Abstracts Category : Other

The Work of Disaster: Events of Affliction, Care, and Intervention in Nepal

by Aidan Seale-Feldman

This dissertation offers an ethnographic account of mental health governance, psychosocial interventions, and forms of shared affliction in Nepal before and after the 2015 earthquakes. By thinking with theories of event and crisis through the lens of critical phenomenology, I ask the following questions: How can ethnography approach emergent phenomena? How does an affliction become knowable through a particular concept and made into an object of intervention? How is evidence for therapeutic efficacy made visible in the midst of a psychosocial encounter? What are the local/global historical, political, and socioeconomic forces that have brought about the emergence of mental health governance in Nepal? Based on 24 months of field research, I conducted participant observation, interviews, focus groups, household surveys, and followed psychosocial counselors in the field to respond to these questions. In the first part of the dissertation I outline the history of mental health governance in Nepal in relation to the emergence of the Global Mental Health movement. In the second part I examine cases of adolescent mass hysteria as they were conceptualized as conversion disorder, hysteria, "chhopne," and "bhut/pret," "pissach laagne." In the third and final part I track the humanitarian mental health response in the aftermath of the disaster and its ramifications. In order to address the ethical question of the possibilities and impossibilities of field research under situations of emergency, I discuss how new forms of ethnographic engagement were needed to respond to the unfolding disaster. As a conclusion, I conceptualize what I call the "work of disaster" as a way to frame what was generated through the event of disaster and what was destroyed, what was accomplished through various narratives of crisis and what was foreclosed, the processes by which affliction was made visible or rendered invisible, and the historical contexts that created the possibility for these formations.