Description
Book SynopsisSpacious Minds argues that resilience is not a mere absence of suffering. Sara E. Lewis''s research reveals how those who cope most gracefully may indeed experience deep pain and loss. Looking at the Tibetan diaspora, she challenges perspectives that liken resilience to the hardiness of physical materials, suggesting people should bounce back from adversity. More broadly, this ethnography calls into question the tendency to use trauma as an organizing principle for all studies of conflict where suffering is understood as an individual problem rooted in psychiatric illness.
Beyond simply articulating the ways that Tibetan categories of distress are different from biomedical ones, Spacious Minds shows how Tibetan Buddhism frames new possibilities for understanding resilience. Here, the social and religious landscape encourages those exposed to violence to see past events as impermanent and illusory, where debriefing, working-through, or processing past events only
Trade Review
Lewis' expertise in both Western and Tibetan approaches to trauma and resilience could not be more needed at this time, and Spacious Minds distills her expertise in a manner that is scholarly, engaging, and accessible to lay readers, clinicians, and academics alike. Her work is a profound reminder that there is no one right way to understand or experience trauma, nor one right way to recover from it.
* Buddhadharma *
Sara E. Lewis's Spacious Minds is an important and engaging work for those interested in cross-cultural psychology and well-being, anthropology, diaspora studies, those seeking a better understanding of the complexities designing public and mental health interventions, and all who seek to understand 'sociocultural practices that bolster communities under duress.'
* Medical Antrhopology Quarterly *
Spacious Minds thus offers a brilliant illustration of how the anthropological study of the mind provides an innovative avenue to illuminate and engage with the very material world of policy, politics and power.
* Anthropology in Action *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Transliteration
Central Characters
Introduction
1. Life in Exile
2. Mind Training
3. Resisting Chronicity
4. The Paradox of Testimony
5. Open Sky of Mind
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
