Dominique P. Béhague is a social anthropologist and critical health scholar. She is currently Associate Professor of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine at King’s College London (summer term), and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She holds a MA in Anthropology (Bryn Mawr College, USA), a PhD in Social Anthropology (2004, McGill University, Canada) and a MSc in Epidemiology (2009, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). Dominique’s long-term ethnographic and epidemiological research in Southern Brazil explores how different kinds of adolescent psychopathologies and developmental trajectories unfold in response to social, economic, political, and psychiatric interventions. She has also conducted research on the politics of evidence-production in global health. Both of these projects are underpinned by an interest in the social life of epistemic values and ontological practices.
Presentation Abstract
Notes on the political and moral life of psychiatric epistemes in Southern Brazil: from the clinic to the longue durée
Recent decades have witnessed the powerful rise of biological and behaviorist approaches to “adolescent” health problems in Anglophone psychiatry and in global health more generally. In Brazil, these approaches have gained considerable traction despite the fact that many psychiatrists practice a form of social psychiatry that seeks to explicitly “resist” the “encroachment” of Anglophone psychiatry and draws from long-standing commitments to psychoanalysis, social epidemiology and Marxist community medicine. In this presentation, I draw from a historical ethnography conducted in Pelotas, Southern Brazil, to examine the reasons for this conundrum. Thinking with -- and against -- a form of analysis centered on the globalization and power of psychiatric knowledge-forms, I ask not how science and the clinic “construct” their objects but rather how such objects are co-constituted in multi-directional relationships between clinic, science, and the everyday. In my fieldwork, I followed a group of 96 young people from their 15thbirthdays onwards. As I watched them grow up, flowing in and out of clinics and psycho-pedagogic initiatives in schools, I witnessed a diverse range of “adolescent” life-trajectories materialize, some considerably more pathologized than others. I learned that science and the clinic were not driving engines in this story but were, rather, midway points, recurring stopping points even, in much larger journeys. These journeys, seeped in far-reaching political and moral desires, hark back to multi-generational medico-political histories and harbor within them the potential for a unique form of psychiatric productivity.