Abstract

This thesis involves an ethnography of three field sites related to the scientific discipline of transcultural psychiatry — sites representative of its classroom, laboratory, and clinical activities. This psychiatric discipline, which incorporates conceptual and methodological elements of anthropology, holds that cultural variability and social positionality are important factors in illness and wellness. As such, the field disrupts both the materialist notions of the body dominant in contemporary biomedicine, and the cognitive explanatory models of conventional psychology. Despite this alternative approach to health and healthcare, transcultural psychiatrists in Montreal continue to position themselves as scientifically credible and medically authoritative.

My research project asks how the role and status of the body in medicine is affected in the context of such a field, which openly troubles received divisions between subjectivity and objectivity, nature and culture, social and material reality, and physiological or psychological stress. In particular, I consider the diagnostic attitudes and practices of transcultural psychiatry, which I articulate as an attempt to give name to culturally-situated forms of embodied disorder. By introducing ethnographic consultation into the diagnostic process, transcultural psychiatry opens up these scientific names to a new kind of participatory construction. This being the case, the diagnostic practice of the discipline consists of naming otherwise, or naming differently.