Event Abstract
How should clinicians and anthropologists understand religious practices that are initially sustaining but later become entangled with psychotic experience?
This talk examines the case of a woman in her sixties whose intensive Buddha-name recitation became associated with encounters with invisible agents. These presences were initially experienced as benevolent and therapeutic, but gradually became coercive, painful and disabling. Clinically, her experiences were interpreted as acute and transient psychotic disorder and later schizophrenia. She and her family, however, drew on the vernacular concept of zouhuo rumo (meaning “running fire, entering the demonic”) to describe a process in which a valued spiritual practice had gone dangerously awry.
I use the case to explore how extraordinary experiences change in meaning and consequence over time. I develop zouhuo rumo as a vernacular theory of religious peril, one that directs attention to changes in agency, moral valence, bodily effects and the possibility of repair. Placing this concept in dialogue with anthropological work on possession, dissociation and the porous mind, I ask what happens when culturally meaningful experiences become difficult to contain within existing frameworks. The talk concludes by considering what anthropology can contribute to psychiatric care.
Registration
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