I met Pierre (34)[1] in a northern Santiago neighbourhood during my ethnographic fieldwork early in 2018. He was one of the hundreds of Haitians who arrived in Chile, and particularly to this area of the city, following what some Latin American newspapers have called the “Chilean Dream”. This refers to the flow of Latin American and Caribbean migrants who …
Tag Archives: Psychological anthropology
The metropolis and mental life in the age of COVID-19: Delaying descent into the blasé attitude
The COVID city: Class, physical isolation, and virtual connection
At the time of writing this we are all experiencing what the classical sociologist Émile Durkheim would call a “social fact” — something that cuts across all individuals and exerts social control on each of us. Today this solidarity-in-separation encompasses almost the whole world (Davies 2019). We are also enduring a …
Fragments of a Transient Affliction: “Mass Hysteria” and the Question of Subjectivity
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 …
Autism in Translation: An Intercultural Conversation on Autism Spectrum Conditions (Eds. Elizabeth Fein and Clarice Rios)

Autism in Translation: An Intercultural Conversation on Autism Spectrum Conditions
Edited by Elizabeth Fein and Clarice Rios
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 304 pages.
Autism in Translation: An Intercultural Conversation on Autism Spectrum Conditions—an edited collection out of the Society of Psychological Anthropology’s (SPA) Culture, Mind and Society series—aims to contextualize the different social and political histories of, treatments for, and …
Ethnography Labs: Unpacking Ethnographic Narrative
My first experience teaching an ethnographic text to a classroom full of students was rocky. My attempts to draw them out into making connections between the ethnographic materials and our big course questions were met with silence. I, panicked, asked ever more concrete questions about the text, while the silence slowly turned stony until a chatty student desperately regurgitated some …
Why I Make Ethnographic Films (Instead of Writing a Monograph…)
This post is largely unaltered from its original form on the new blog Psychocultural Cinema, which focuses on the intersection of medical and psychological anthropology with ethnographic and documentary filmmaking.
Orwell was once asked by his editor to address the question “why I write.” Orwell, in his typically clear and direct manner, listed a range of reasons, from personal …