Description
Book SynopsisCultural Anxieties is a compelling ethnography about Centre Minkowska, a transcultural psychiatry clinic in Paris, France. From her unique position as both observer and staff member, Stéphanie Larchanché explores the challenges of providing non-stigmatizing mental healthcare to migrants, and she identifies practical routes for improving caregiving practices.
Trade Review“Stéphanie Larchanché’s
Cultural Anxieties is a timely and compelling account not only of contemporary French politics of mental health, difference, and migration, but also of a broad and pervasive sense of anxious living which informs and shape the institutional practices of care and cure in many Western liberal democracies. Larchanché is particularly well positioned – both as a medical anthropologist and as a therapist – to reflect upon the work of anxiety within and outside clinical settings, providing an important ethnography of the contemporary.”
-- Cristiana Giordano * author of Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy *
"Cultural Anxieties offers a nuanced, thoughtful and engaged anthropological look at the management of cultural difference in a country where universalism is the national ideology. Taking the transcultural psychiatry clinic as a laboratory and a site of contestation, Larchanché refuses easy critiques, instead drawing attention to the difficult work of everyday care, and how it can build a politics of hospitality in the face of racism, injustice and inequality."
-- Miriam Ticktin * author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France *
"
Cultural Anxieties provides rich food for thought on a range of topics, but its greatest contribution lies in the book’s nuanced analysis of the distinctive approach to “cultural competence” undergirding Centre Minkowska’s work. A timely, fascinating, and vitally important ethnography that elegantly captures the heart of Centre Minkowska’s ethos as well as its distinct approach to cultural competence." * EuropeNow *
“Stéphanie Larchanché’s
Cultural Anxieties is a timely and compelling account not only of contemporary French politics of mental health, difference, and migration, but also of a broad and pervasive sense of anxious living which informs and shape the institutional practices of care and cure in many Western liberal democracies. Larchanché is particularly well positioned – both as a medical anthropologist and as a therapist – to reflect upon the work of anxiety within and outside clinical settings, providing an important ethnography of the contemporary.”
-- Cristiana Giordano * author of Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy *
"Cultural Anxieties offers a nuanced, thoughtful and engaged anthropological look at the management of cultural difference in a country where universalism is the national ideology. Taking the transcultural psychiatry clinic as a laboratory and a site of contestation, Larchanché refuses easy critiques, instead drawing attention to the difficult work of everyday care, and how it can build a politics of hospitality in the face of racism, injustice and inequality."
-- Miriam Ticktin * author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France *
"
Cultural Anxieties provides rich food for thought on a range of topics, but its greatest contribution lies in the book’s nuanced analysis of the distinctive approach to “cultural competence” undergirding Centre Minkowska’s work. A timely, fascinating, and vitally important ethnography that elegantly captures the heart of Centre Minkowska’s ethos as well as its distinct approach to cultural competence." * EuropeNow *
Table of ContentsForeword by Lenore Manderson
List of Abbreviations / Glossary
Introduction: Cultural Anxieties
A Day at Centre Minkowska
Part I The Context
1 A Genealogy of “Migrant Suffering”
2 Transcultural Practice at Centre Minkowska
Part II Referral Narratives and Ethical Double-Binds
3 Cultural and Linguistic Difference as Obstacles to Care
4 Managing “Migrant Youth”
Part III Ethical Deliberations
5 Enacting Cultural Competence
6 Psychotherapy at the Borderland
7 Beyond Anxieties: Praxis
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
