Journal Articles by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2022
While the literature on psychedelic medicine emphasizes the importance of set and setting alongsi... more While the literature on psychedelic medicine emphasizes the importance of set and setting alongside the quality of subjective drug effects for therapeutic efficacy, few scholars have explored the therapeutic frameworks that are used alongside psychedelics in the lab or in the clinic. Based on a narrative analysis of the treatment manual and post-session experience reports from a pilot study of psilocybin-assisted treatment for tobacco smoking cessation, this article examines how therapeutic frameworks interact with the psychedelic substance in ways that can rapidly reshape participants' identity and sense of self. We identified multiple domains relating to identity shift that appear to serve as smoking cessation mechanisms during psilocybin sessions, each of which had an identifiable presence in the manualized treatment. As psychedelic medicine becomes mainstream, consensual and evidence-based approaches to psychedelic-assisted identity shift that respect patient autonomy and encourage empowerment should become areas of focus in the emergent field of psychedelic bioethics.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2022
Following in the wake of the People’s War (1996–2006) and the 2015 earthquakes, donor-funded proj... more Following in the wake of the People’s War (1996–2006) and the 2015 earthquakes, donor-funded projects supporting community mental health programmes and psychosocial counselling have proliferated in Nepal. This article explores one outcome of the expansion of ‘psy’: the transformation of ghosts and spirits, bhut-pret, into a psychosomatic affliction of repressed emotion and unconscious desire. By engaging theories of translation, I approach interventions for cases of ‘mass conversion disorder’ and the therapeutic encounters, contestations and uncertainties that coalesced around them as a lens into the politics of psychic life currently under way in Nepal.
Cultural Anthropology, 2020
What does a disaster generate? This article brings a critical phenomenological approach into conv... more What does a disaster generate? This article brings a critical phenomenological approach into conversation with theories of event to trace the emergence of a mental health crisis and its consequences in Nepal after the 2015 earthquakes. Following the disaster, people who received psychosocial counseling often presented chronic problems that had become visible through the frame of crisis and its ethical demands. At the same time, humanitarian agencies were aware of the logics of crisis and strategically used the disaster as an opportunity to increase mental health governance under the rubric of “building back better.” I demonstrate that these phenomena are linked consequences of the work of disaster, the destruction and creation of worlds set into motion by disaster and its management. I argue that a phenomenological approach to disaster helps us attend to the ways a priori frames of crisis and “the better” create and foreclose possibilities both for care and for building the world back otherwise.
HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2020
This article traces a genealogy of mental health governance in Nepal as it was constituted in and... more This article traces a genealogy of mental health governance in Nepal as it was constituted in and through an assemblage of historical events, local politics, personal relationships and trends in the field of global health development. The relation between health development and local politics in Nepal is explored across four periods in the history of global health: 1) the early health development programs of disease eradication after the end of the Rana oligarchy (1951-1970); 2) the turn to primary health care during the Panchayat (1970-1990); 3) the rise of NGOs and the People’s War (1990-2010); and 4) the return to health systems development in the post-conflict/post-earthquake period (2010-present). By drawing on a combination of archival research and a cross-disciplinary review of the literature on global mental health, this article tracks the changing projects of mental health development programs in Nepal over the past century. In doing so, it becomes possible to observe the shifting trends in the problematization of mental health and the management of psychic life in Nepal from 1950 to the emergence of global mental health.
Ethos , 2019
An ethnographic exploration of "mass hysteria" in Nepal reconsiders existing anthropological trea... more An ethnographic exploration of "mass hysteria" in Nepal reconsiders existing anthropological treatments of this form of affliction as gendered resistance. In Nepal, affected communities and girls dispute psychosocial counselors and anthropologists on conceptual grounds. These conflicts revolve around two distinct understandings of the subject of affliction. The subject of "mass hysteria" takes a liberal feminist form in which symptoms reveal resistance to power, while for the subject afflicted by ghosts and spirits, bhut-pret laagne, symptoms reveal the intertwined relationality between bodies and the world. I argue that by shifting attention away from questions of resistance, desire, and truth of the individual, we find that the concepts of chopne and bhut-pret laagne are concerned with the transfer, sharing, and relationality of affliction. By placing Nepali and Euro-American conceptualizations in dialogue, haunting is approached not as idiom or metaphor but as an analytic with which to construct new conceptual frameworks.
Book Chapters by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Antropologia: ensino, pesquisa e etnografia hoje, 2023
A chapter on the work of Thomas Csordas, for the edited volume "Anthropology: Teaching, Research,... more A chapter on the work of Thomas Csordas, for the edited volume "Anthropology: Teaching, Research, and Ethnography Today" organized by Kleyton Rattes, Marcelo Moura Mello, and Simone Silva in Brazil.
Nepalese Psychology: Volume One, 2022
What role has Nepal played in the field of psychological anthropology? Psychological anthropology... more What role has Nepal played in the field of psychological anthropology? Psychological anthropology is a subfield of anthropology traditionally concerned with the study of culture, mind, experience, self, and person. Over the past 50 years, a number of psychological anthropologists have conducted person-centered ethnographic research in Nepal, and from this research developed influential work—both theoretical and applied. This essay reviews the history of psychological anthropology in Nepal and considers the place of Nepal as an ethnographic site in the production of knowledge for psychological anthropology from studies of self, person, and experience to its applications in the field of global mental health.
Interviews by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsites, 2021
In November 2020, we invited Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective to do an inter... more In November 2020, we invited Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective to do an interview on their work for the Screening Room. Our invitation reached Povinelli in Belyuen, Australia, where the Karrabing members had recently reunited. We are pleased to present this interview with the collective, facilitated by Elizabeth Povinelli.
Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, 2020
In the Summer of 2019, Aidan Seale-Feldman sat down with director Kesang Tseten in Kathmandu to t... more In the Summer of 2019, Aidan Seale-Feldman sat down with director Kesang Tseten in Kathmandu to talk about anthropology, cinematic aesthetics, and his practice of filmmaking.
Society for Cultural Anthropology-Fieldsites, 2020
Lachlan Summers: The research for this article emerged in a shocking way—the Nepal earthquakes of... more Lachlan Summers: The research for this article emerged in a shocking way—the Nepal earthquakes of 2015—rather than being part of your original research design. How did you manage such a radical shift? And, thinking of the innumerable graduate students and researchers currently changing their research plans due to Covid-19, what ethical questions did you grapple with when this change happened, and how did you manage them?
Public Scholarship by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Anthropology News, 2022
When confronting disaster, there are lessons to be found in Himalayan conceptions of the world.
Somatosphere, 2020
A study of “mass hysteria” is a study of fragments of a phenomenon in its absence. Absent because... more A study of “mass hysteria” is a study of fragments of a phenomenon in its absence. Absent because of its transient nature; the affliction appears suddenly, without warning, spreading and transferring from one person to another, and then suddenly it dissipates and is gone. People cautiously return to their lives, unsure when another outbreak might occur. How to study a phenomenon in its absence? How to understand a limit-experience of affliction, when those who underwent it only come to know it through the words, photographs, and moving images captured and mediated by others? How to approach a form of affliction that is decentered from the individual, and instead transfers and circulates between bodies and the world?
The Record, 2019
“When a child cannot talk about her anger to anyone what happens?” Shanti asked the group of teac... more “When a child cannot talk about her anger to anyone what happens?” Shanti asked the group of teachers who had gathered for the psychoeducation session in the office of the government school. Shanti, a psychosocial counselor, had come to the rural district to treat a case of adolescent “mass conversion disorder,” popularly known as “mass hysteria,” that had been reported to the NGOs for mental health and counseling in Kathmandu. This was not an unheard-of event in schools, where episodes entailed sudden unexpected symptoms of screaming, crying, writhing, hair-pulling and loss of consciousness, which spread throughout a group, usually of teenage girls.
Correspondences, Fieldsights, 2018
Many anthropologists drawn to experimental forms of ethnography have gravitated toward images as ... more Many anthropologists drawn to experimental forms of ethnography have gravitated toward images as method. Lisa Stevenson (2014, 10) has proposed an “anthropology through the image,” suggesting that “drawing our anthropological attention back to imagistic rather than discursive modes of knowing allows us to be faithful to…experiences that have often gone unthought in ethnography.” Similarly, Michael Taussig (2011, 13) has characterized the immediacy of the drawn sketch as a mode of ethnographic understanding, writing that “drawing intervenes in the reckoning of reality in ways that writing and photography do not.” Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab has produced films including Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, in which worlds are explored entirely through visual and sonic forms. As Stevenson and Eduardo Kohn (2015, 52) have suggested, Leviathan is “more like an ethnographic dream than a film.” They argue that “if the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology . . . is about finding ways to make room for other kinds of realities that we discover ethnographically without domesticating them as human, social, cultural, or linguistic constructions, then Leviathan provides a sensorial method for allowing these realities to make us over” (Stevenson and Kohn 2015, 52).
Images and image-making have increasingly become objects of anthropological inquiry, inspiring such work as Anand Pandian’s (2015) Reel World, which explores the anthropology of creation through an ethnography of Tamil cinema; Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s (2016) Realizing the Witch, a reflection on Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Häxan; Tarek Elhaik’s (2016) The Incurable-Image, on Mexican curatorial practices; and the Society for Cultural Anthropology website’s own Visual and New Media Review.
Echoing throughout this work in and on images is a larger question regarding the role of ethnography in the production of anthropological knowledge. This Correspondences session invites five anthropologists to ask: What form of understanding do images afford? How might images enable the anthropologist to access other worlds and forms of thought? What is an anthropology of or through the image? And what might engaging images as method or object contribute to contemporary anthropology?
Book and Film Reviews by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsites, 2021
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Journal Articles by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Book Chapters by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Interviews by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Public Scholarship by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Images and image-making have increasingly become objects of anthropological inquiry, inspiring such work as Anand Pandian’s (2015) Reel World, which explores the anthropology of creation through an ethnography of Tamil cinema; Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s (2016) Realizing the Witch, a reflection on Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Häxan; Tarek Elhaik’s (2016) The Incurable-Image, on Mexican curatorial practices; and the Society for Cultural Anthropology website’s own Visual and New Media Review.
Echoing throughout this work in and on images is a larger question regarding the role of ethnography in the production of anthropological knowledge. This Correspondences session invites five anthropologists to ask: What form of understanding do images afford? How might images enable the anthropologist to access other worlds and forms of thought? What is an anthropology of or through the image? And what might engaging images as method or object contribute to contemporary anthropology?
Book and Film Reviews by Aidan Seale-Feldman
Images and image-making have increasingly become objects of anthropological inquiry, inspiring such work as Anand Pandian’s (2015) Reel World, which explores the anthropology of creation through an ethnography of Tamil cinema; Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s (2016) Realizing the Witch, a reflection on Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Häxan; Tarek Elhaik’s (2016) The Incurable-Image, on Mexican curatorial practices; and the Society for Cultural Anthropology website’s own Visual and New Media Review.
Echoing throughout this work in and on images is a larger question regarding the role of ethnography in the production of anthropological knowledge. This Correspondences session invites five anthropologists to ask: What form of understanding do images afford? How might images enable the anthropologist to access other worlds and forms of thought? What is an anthropology of or through the image? And what might engaging images as method or object contribute to contemporary anthropology?