Psychological Anthropology
Psychological anthropology has long shaped anthropology’s broader project. Across its histories, the field has explored how persons emerge through sociocultural worlds, attending to emotional, cognitive, embodied, and relational dimensions of human life. Psychological Anthropology challenges universalizing assumptions of ‘Western’ psychology and psychiatry, foregrounding historically situated understandings of self, psyche, and personhood while critically engaging neighboring fields such as cultural psychology, transcultural psychiatry, psychotherapy, or phenomenology, to mention but a few. In an increasingly interconnected and multi-polar world, psychological anthropology is uniquely positioned to examine tensions between universalizing and relativizing understandings of the human condition, as well as the inequalities, violences, and changing forms of subjectivity produced through contemporary global conditions.
At the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, research and teaching focus on affect and emotion, childhood and youth, education and learning, mental health and illness, migration and mobility, stigmatization and marginalization, and postcolonial and decolonial thought. Our work spans street-related communities in Indonesia, therapeutic spaces in India, and collaborative international projects on affect and ethnography, Global Mental Health, envy, and critical perspectives on big data. Current research engages transregional contexts across South/East Asia and Europe, including gender and emotion, schizophrenia and Global Mental Health, therapeutic spaces in migration, femicide, transnational belonging, transformative pedagogies, education and self-formation, permaculture in education and therapy, and the intersections of space, technology, and religion.
