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3 - Schizoid Balinese?: Anthropology’s Double Bind: Radical Alterity and Its Consequences for Schizophrenia
- Edited by William Sax, Claudia Lang
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- Book:
- The Movement for Global Mental Health
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 27 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp 65-100
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Summary
Abstract
This contribution explores “schizophrenia” as a contested Western discourse fluctuating between biomedical naturalism and anti-psychiatric cultural relativism. Although the latter was seen as an epistemic counterweight to, and critique of, a modern Western paradigm of normality, I argue that this alternative is couched in a Eurocentric ideology about radical alterity that ignores local interpretations along with practices of social reintegration. I will elucidate this in view of Mead's and Bateson's interpretation of the allegedly “schizoid” Balinese and its entanglement with the anti-psychiatric movement, which I will contrast with my fieldwork in Bali that illustrates how deviant behaviour and dissociation are integrated in social life via local interpretations and ritual practices.
Keywords: history of psychiatry, schizophrenia, Bali, anthropology, radical Alterity
This contribution analyses “schizophrenia” as a contested Western discourse fluctuating between a modern, naturalist or biomedical position, on the one hand, and psychosocial, anti-psychiatric and culturally relativist interpretations on the other. But while the latter were seen as epistemic alternatives to modern Western paradigms of normality and politics, I argue that this very “alternative” is part of a Eurocentric discourse opposing biomedical to psychosocial explanations of radical alterity. In either case, other interpretations of alterity and dissociation, along with practices of social reintegration, are ignored. I will elucidate this argument by a close reading of Mead's and Bateson's ethnographic research and interpretation of the exotic – and allegedly “schizoid” – Balinese and its ambiguous entanglements with both early schizophrenia research and anti-psychiatric theories. In contrast, I conclude with an ethnographic case study from Bali illustrating how deviant behaviour and dissociation can be integrated into social life via local interpretations and ritual practices.
Preliminary Thoughts on Schizophrenia and the Movement for Global Mental Health
A diagnosis of schizophrenia refers to a severe mental and behavioural disorder regarded by modern psychiatry as a universal disease affecting people in societies all around the world and therefore assumed to be a natural kind with physiological and genetic causes even though its exact aetiology remains unclear (Walker et al. 2004). This epistemic assumption also informs the medical treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic drugs, which are regarded, not as a cure but as an efficient treatment and prevention of psychotic episodes that helps some (but not all) patients to lead a normal life (de Mari et al. 2009).
Contested Moksa in Balinese Agama Hindu: BalineseDeath Rituals between Ancestor Worship and ModernHinduism
- Edited by Volker Gottowik
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- Book:
- Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 11 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 04 August 2014, pp 237-260
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Summary
Modernity and religion
The philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that in the ageof Enlightenment, religion as well as politicalpower have to defend their truth claims in the faceof a universal reason. Consequently, religion wasnot abandoned altogether, but rather becameinternally rationalized by the attempt to replacethis-worldly forms of spiritual experience andcharismatic power with a logically coherentreligious doctrine. From a sociological point ofview, Max Weber thus describes modernization as aprocess of increasing and comprehensiverationalization that results in a secular world viewor in a pervasive ‘disenchantment’ of the world thatcorresponds to the Calvinist and capitalist‘habitus’ of this-worldly asceticism (1988 [1920]).This description of a ‘disenchanted’ world applieseven though during the last decade the ‘grand recit’of secularization has been shattered by theunforeseen fact that religion became a powerfulaspect of world politics – a process that has beenidentified by some scholars as a ‘return ofreligion’ in modern society (Berger 1999; Riesebrodt2001; Habermas 2005).
In what follows, I will investigate if and in whichrespects the model of modernization asrationalization can be applied to the religiousfield of Bali, giving special regard to a politicsof religion in Indonesia that seeks to reinterpretthe various ritual and cosmological traditions ofthe archipelago in line with the principles of amodern religion (agama). The Indonesian republic officiallyguarantees religious freedom and pluralism, albeitonly with a strict definition of religion informedby the paradigm of a monotheist and scriptural worldreligion that implies a prophet and a holy bookpreserving a universal and coherent doctrine.Paradigmatic of this agama is the national majority religionIslam, but it would be misleading to assume thatthis politics serves a tacit Islamization; rather,it imposes the Enlightenment idea of religion as auniversal and logically coherent doctrineencompassing ritual practices, cosmologicaltraditions and animist beliefs including indigenousforms of a distinctively Indonesian Islam.Ultimately, Indonesian politics aims at theconsequent reinterpretation of presumably backwardforms of immanent ancestor and nature worship interms of a rationally coherent and thus potentiallyuniversal belief system or doctrine.