The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Neil Krishan Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. He is a cultural psychiatrist and social scientist. His research focuses on translating anthropological theories for clinical use and the cultural analysis of mental health knowledge and practices. 

What is your article “The Evolving Culture Concept in Psychiatric Cultural Formulation: Implications for Anthropological Theory and Psychiatric Practice” about?

“Social scientists debate what terms like “culture” mean. This article traces how the term “culture” has been defined in editions of the psychiatric classification manual known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It explores similarities and definitions in these definitions.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

“I come from a racially, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously minoritized community in the United States. I’ve had to face people’s implicit and explicit biases about me based on my appearance. Therefore, I’m interested in how people generally make interpretations about others. We all make interpretations in everyday life, such as students rating professors, customers rating businesses, or people deciding which way to swipe on dating apps. Anthropologists have long pointed out that psychiatrists also make interpretations about patients through acts of diagnosis. This perspective informs my research interests in cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, and psychiatric anthropology.”

What drew you to this project?

“I’ve spent the past 15 years trying to encourage mental health professionals to think of their work as fundamentally cultural, beyond just attending mandatory cultural competence trainings. I believe that my colleagues in anthropology have conversations that my colleagues in mental health benefit from hearing. Every revision to the DSM is an opportunity to explore the current state of cultural assumptions regarding mental health knowledge and practice. When DSM-5-TR came out in 2022, I saw this as a timely opportunity.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“The model of culture in the DSMs is different from other models that could change clinical practice. The DSM model assumes that providers can ask patients about their identities, that culture resides in the minds of patients. But a model of culture that looks at how patients and clinicians interact allows us to discover how patients and clinicians create culture during appointments.”

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

“I just finished reading this brilliant article by the black queer scholar Keguro Macharia titled “On Being Area Studied.” As one of the few brown men in my departments, I haven’t been equally accepted as a peer, so I’ve been re-reading Frantz Fanon and trying to imagine how he has felt.

I’ve been exalting in the 50^th anniversary of hip-hop this year. No other popular art form provides more incisive social commentary about what it’s like to transcend social marginaliztion as a minoritized individual. I just saw DJ Premier in concert this week, and I’ve been inspired to rediscover the poetry of artists like KRS-One, Rakim, Nas, Biggie Smalls, Q-Tip, Jay-Z, and other greats. I’ve also been jamming to AP Dhillon, Gurinder Gill, Shinda Kahlon, and Karan Aujla on the Punjabi Bhangra side.

I love Hindi cinema. Streaming has really allowed movie stars to try new roles, and I’m captivated by a show titled Asur. Check it out.”

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

“Whether we use knowledge from psychiatry, psychology, the law, or any other form of professionalized expert knowledge, we can never fully know anyone else. How do we cultivate a space for respectful curiosity?”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Twitter

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Lawrence T. Monocello is a T32 Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Lawrence Monocello received his Ph.D. in 2022 from the University of Alabama. His dissertation examined how cultural, social, and political-economic factors shaped disordered eating among South Korean men in Seoul. Currently, he contributes anthropological perspectives to a transdisciplinary team of world-class researchers on preventing/treating eating disorders and childhood obesity.

What is your article “Guys with Big Muscles Have Misplaced Priorities”: Masculinities and Muscularities in Young South Korean Men’s Body Image” about?

“Male body image research only makes up about 1% of the body image literature, and what literature does exist tends to focus on white, Western men’s concerns with muscularity. Using cognitive and biocultural methods, this article examines how young Korean men negotiate and navigate multiple cultural models of ideal male bodies. It not only questions the model of Western masculinity which underlies male body image research but also problematizes the notion of a single kind of “muscularity” to which men may aspire. Drawing on the concept of “masculinities”—the multiple, hierarchized, and increasingly hybridized ways of being male in a given society—this article advances the concept of “muscularities” to account for their multiple, hierarchized, and hybridized models of muscularity, not just as biological traits but as meaningful, embodied engagements with their social and political-economic conditions.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

“My research interests lie primarily in understanding how individuals’ variable engagement with culture affects health. In non-anthropological health research, culture—if it is considered at all—is usually treated as some sort of monolithic, categorical variable to which causality is attributed. Anthropologists have long challenged this notion, understanding that culture is dynamic, and that the lived experience of culture varies individual-to-individual and in relation with other social, political-economic, and demographic factors. However, connecting rich ethnography with broader models and measures of health has proven difficult. Cognitive anthropological mixed-methods, which combine rigorous ethnography and statistical modeling, have a ton of potential for connecting individuals’ lived experience of their meaning systems on their own terms to health outcomes. As I’ve been recently working in a biomedical context, it’s become increasingly evident to me that there is not only great opportunity, but moral necessity, for medical anthropologists to contribute our expertise and be more active in framing research on topics like social determinants of health.”

What drew you to this project?

“When I was a junior at Case Western Reserve University, I took The Anthropology of Body Image with Eileen Anderson. I remember reading some of the literature on male body image and being confused at how, as a white, cisgender male who struggled with body image, the data presented and conclusions it reached seemed not to apply to me that much. It got me really interested in intracultural variation and how it affected lived experience. Once I got to graduate school, I found that body image was “good to think with” during my theory courses. Around the same time, my Asian-American friends from undergrad started sending me K-Pop videos and I noticed how male idols were presenting in media. I became curious about to whether and to what extent men internalized those images versus those in the global White Western media. I found that there wasn’t much research on it, so I decided to do it myself.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“One of the most interesting findings was that, despite a lot of my participants saying that people don’t talk about men’s bodies (at least to the same extent that they do women’s bodies), everyone had opinions about them and everyone’s understandings of social expectations about men’s bodies and their meaning were extremely consistent.”

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

“Now that I’ve finished my dissertation I’m trying to get back into reading fiction. I’m in the middle of Moby Dick now. I used to be kind of skeptical of “queer readings” of literature, but I’m convinced that it’s the only way to read Moby Dick.”

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

“When we’re looking to address difficult phenomena like eating disorders across cultures, it’s extremely important for researchers to (1) unpack how people are really experiencing it (i.e., not just transplanting political-economically powerful white US emic perspectives elsewhere) and (2) for anthropologists to be able to articulate the barriers and disjunctures which emerge during ethnographic fieldwork in ways accessible to the actors who directly interact with people suffering from the phenomena (i.e., clinicians, public health practitioners, policymakers).”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
LinkedIn
Twitter

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Iben Emilie Christensen is a Danish sociologist and PhD student at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, and at VIVE, The Danish Center for Social Science Research. She is in the final stage of her PhD project focusing on everyday life among people with severe mental and physical illnesses.

What is your article “Senses of Touch: The Absence and Presence of Touch in Health Care Encounters of Patients with Mental Illness“ about?

“Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article explores the significance of touch and physical examination in different healthcare encounters among people with severe mental (schizophrenia, bipolar disease, and severe depression) and physical illnesses. We found that touch and physical examination of this patient group is limited in healthcare encounters leaving the patients with feelings of being misunderstood, less socially approved, and less worthy of trust. Despite patients being seen, heard and treated with care and empathy by health care professionals, it was not enough for them to feel recognized or think of the encounter as a pleasant one. Overall, the article shows that when touch and physical examination takes place in healthcare encounters it gives the patients recognition – their bodily sensations and symptoms are taken seriously and not least, they are recognized as patients and human beings, suffering from a somatic disease and not only mental disorders with psychiatric label.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

“The overall aim of my PhD project is to study the everyday life among people who live with both mental and physical illnesses, and to explore how they experience and navigate within the health care system. My PhD is part of a larger research project at the University of Copenhagen called SOFIA, with the primary aim to reduce the all-cause mortality of patients with severe mental illness and comorbidity in Denmark by improving the treatment of their comorbid physical conditions in general practice. The findings contribute to the SOFIA project regarding the experiences of people with severe mental and physical illnesses, their healthcare-seeking strategies, and their experiences when engaging with the healthcare system.”

What drew you to this project?

“I worked as a researcher at VIVE, The Danish Center for Social Science Research, when I was offered the opportunity to be part of the large research project SOFIA as a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen. The chance to explore a new research field, such as psychiatry, and a particular interest in inequity and inequality in healthcare motivated me to pursue this project. People with severe mental illness die 10-20 years earlier compared to people without mental illness and according to research part of this excess mortality stems from physical illnesses, which are believed to be underdiagnosed and undertreated. The ethnographic fieldwork gained important insight into the interlocutors’ everyday life, which also involved these topics.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“In the beginning of the PhD study, I did not anticipate that touch, particularly procedural touch (physically examination of patients), would to be the topic of the first article. However, during fieldwork and when observing the interlocutors as they interacted with different healthcare professionals, I wondered why they never seemed to find the encounter pleasant. This prompted my co-authors and I to focus on what did not take place, what did not occur and what I did not observe, leading us to realize the significance of touch in healthcare encounters.”

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

“Since my next article focuses on patients’ experiences of symptoms and the interpretative process when living with mental and physical illnesses simultaneously, I read about bodily sensations and how they transform into symptoms in an everyday life perspective.”

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

“People with severe mental illness often face vulnerability, social exposure, and stigma, and may live on the edge of society. I believe, that if a doctor’s caring hand and a physical examination during healthcare encounters give this patient group a feeling of being recognized as they are, as patients with potential somatic illness, and as human beings with same rights and possibilities, I think it is a minimal adjustment to incorporate touch as a continuous procedure in healthcare encounters.”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
LinkedIn

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Omnia El Shakry is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. Her research centers on the history of the human and religious sciences in modern Egypt.

What is your article “The Work of Illness in the Aftermath of a ‘Surpassing Disaster’: Medical Humanities in the Middle East and North Africa” about?

“The article serves as a commentary on new work in the medical humanities in the Middle East, while posing a series of questions. What happens when we question the role of the expert and the idea of the detached rationality of expertise in medicine and psychiatry? How should we account for the cultural specificity of illness and of healing practices in the Middle East, particularly in institutional contexts in which the mental hospital aspired to function as a ‘healing collective’? Given that the Middle East has been at the center of a series of catastrophic events, how can we understand the persistent inability of modern medicine to understand physical anguish, but also spiritual pain, within this context? Middle East studies is, I think, especially well situated to consider these questions, precisely because the region is an arena in which so many of the experiments of group life—both in its traumatism and its healing—model distinct ways of imagining non-materialist understandings of illness, suffering, and healing.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

“I am an intellectual historian interested in epistemology and ethics within the human and religious sciences. I am currently working on two projects– one is on the work of Sami-Ali, the Arabic translator of Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, author of a large body of original psychoanalytic writings, and translator of the poetry of Sufi masters. The second is on the vibrant movement of intellectual exchange between Muslim and Catholic scholars and religious practitioners in twentieth century Egypt.”

What drew you to this project?

“I was a participant in the conference “Power in Medicine: Interrogating the Place of Medical Knowledge in the Modern Middle East,” organized by Edna Bonhomme, Lamia Moghnieh, and Shehab Ismail in Berlin in April of 2019. The piece is a commentary on the specific articles that came out of that conference and are published in CMP and on the wider issues raised by the workshop. But it is more than that, it is also partly and indirectly a reflection on my own personal experience with illness, my frustration with biomedicine, and my dear friend and colleague Stefania Pandolfo’s inspiration and encouragement to see the ‘wound light.’”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“I was especially struck by how intellectually generative it was to juxtapose Georges Canguilhem’s observation in the Normal and the Pathological that to be a living organism is to accept “the eventuality of catastrophic reactions,” alongside Jalal Toufic’s theorization of the “withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.””

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

“I am currently reading David Marriott’s brilliant Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism. I am (almost) always listening to The Mountain Goats and I watch a ton of TV, which I affectionately refer to as ‘cheap therapy,’ and have been enjoying The Peripheral and the current season of Bob’s Burgers.”

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

“That we should work toward imagining the non-West as a site for the production and critique of theoretical knowledge (or ‘theory’) within the human sciences, rather than merely a site for its consumption and circulation.”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
Other

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science and writer based in Berlin, Germany. Edna’s research critically engages with how people navigate the unsavory and unwieldy states of health—primarily how people contend with contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, and illness narratives. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the London Review of Books and elsewhere. Edna’s forthcoming book examines contagion in confined spaces.

What is your article “Medicine and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa: Transdisciplinary Approaches in Medical Humanities” about?

“I co-edited a special issue that elucidated the intellectual and transdisciplinary approaches to medicine and psychiatry in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The journal issue is a compilation of various papers from an interdisciplinary workshop we co-organized in Berlin while I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science. The two-day workshop was held in Berlin in April 2019 and generated live interventions and debates about medicine’s connection to colonialism, humanitarianism,  and nationalism in the MENA region. This co-written introduction provides a theoretical framework for articulating the region’s specificities and some universal trends. We argue that the authors engage in broader discussions that not only frame disease, health, and healing in the Middle East and North Africa while also exploring how medical practices in the region dovetail with global trends.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

“I am a historian of science, culture writer, and editor who explores how people navigate the unsavory and unwieldy states of health—especially subjects that discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives. I write cultural criticism, features, book reviews, and opinion pieces. I am especially interested in human driven narratives and to think actively about those who have been excluded from history, which often means thinking actively about a wide range of sources and archives.”

What drew you to this project? 

“In 2017, I graduated with a PhD in History of Science from Princeton University and my dissertation, “Plagued Bodies and Spaces’ ‘ examined the origins and progression of epidemics in North Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a historian, my research examines contagion, epidemics, and toxicity by asking: what makes people sick? As a writer, I narrate how people perceive modern plagues and how they try to escape from them through critical storytelling. My writing about illness and health draws on my educational training in biology (BA), public health (MPH), and in history of science (PhD), and I invite readers to sit with the messiness of contagion, the discomforts of maladies, and the power of embodied knowledge, while also finding people’s desire to heal.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“Rather than look solely at illness as a given or have a universal definition of mental illness, we tried to explore how categories of disease have shifted within the Middle East and North Africa. At least at the level of merchants, goods, and materials potentially being the sites of vectors, but also being a site of control at the level of trade. These ideas and rules have evolved; they have taken on new meanings. This is primarily in the context of the age that we live in and of the rise of the nation-state, specifically, border regimes that made it even more challenging to travel between empires that were far more possible 400 years ago. How we define a disease and how we navigate trauma is also something the special issue explored.”

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

 I am drawn to creative fiction, to the power of imagination and the ways that people conjure new worlds. As such, I have been reading novels and poetry, including the works of Namwali Serpell, Sheila Heti, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Deborah Levy, Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine and more. These writers are teaching me to get lost in the page and to escape the world as we know it.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be? 

Most of the labor for this project was done after the workshop and during the pandemic. My collaborator and I went through a pandemic, coordinated from different time zones, and underwent major life changes. We were mourning our past lives while also holding dear to our labor and our commitment to producing scholarship about medicine, disease, and psychiatry. One thing that made this project successful is our tenacity and commitment to collective projects. As such, I highly recommend that people take the time and care to work with other researchers who not only articulate their intellectual interests but who also have a mutual work ethic.

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
Twitter
Substack