'Psychosis of civilization': a colonial-situated diagnosis

In the late 1930s, when colonial psychiatry was well established in the Maghreb, the diagnosis 'psychosis of civilization' appeared in some psychiatrists' writings. Through the clinical case of a Libyan woman treated by the Italian psychiatrist Angelo Bravi in Tripoli, this article explores its emergence and its specificity in a differential approach, and highlights its main characteristics. The term applied to subjects poised between two worlds: incapable of becoming 'like' Europeans - a goal to which they seem to aspire - but too far from their 'ancestral habits' to revert for a quiet life. The visits of these subjects to colonial psychiatric institutions, provided valuable new material for psychiatrists: to see how colonization impacted inner life and to raise awareness of the long-term socio-political dangers.

[Hitupmã'ax: intercultural education and specific health care for the Maxakali people]

This study analyzed an artifact (a book on health) conceived by the Maxakali people, called Hitupmã'ax: curar (2008). Parallel to the project for the production of this book, the aim was to understand the negotiation of public health in Brazil from a historical and intercultural perspective of non-Western epistemologies. It was found that the construction of the Maxakali work represented an effort to bridge the gap in the perception of health and health care between indigenous and non-indigenous people. This was then used to demonstrate the importance of this intercultural project for the shaping of public policies for indigenous people in general and particularly for the promotion of the history, knowledge, and culture of the Maxakali people.

Evaluating the Aboriginal child's mind: assimilation and cross-cultural psychology in Australia

This article examines two psychological interventions with Australian Aboriginal children in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first involved evaluating the cognitive maturation of Aboriginal adolescents using a series of Piagetian interviews. The second, a more extensive educational intervention, used a variety of quantitative tests to measure and intervene in the intellectual performance of Aboriginal preschoolers. In both of these interventions the viability of the psychological instruments in the cross-cultural encounter created ongoing ambiguity as to the value of the research outcomes. Ultimately, the resolution of this ambiguity in favour of notions of Aboriginal 'cultural deprivation' reflected the broader political context of debates over Aboriginal self-governance during this period.

Hybridising Medicine: Illness, Healing and the Dynamics of Reciprocal Exchange on the Upper Guinea Coast (West Africa)

The present article seeks to fill a number of lacunae with regard to the study of the circulation and assimilation of different bodies of medical knowledge in an important cultural contact zone, that is the Upper Guinea Coast. Building upon ongoing research on trade and cultural brokerage in the area, it focuses upon shifting attitudes and practices with regard to health and healing as a result of cultural interaction and hybridisation against the background of growing intra-African and Afro-Atlantic interaction from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. Largely based upon travel accounts, missionary reports and documents produced by the Portuguese Inquisition, it shows how forms of medical knowledge shifted and circulated between littoral areas and their hinterland, as well as between the coast, the Atlantic and beyond. It shows that the changing patterns of trade, migration and settlement associated with Mandé influence and Afro-Atlantic exchange had a decisive impact on changing notions of illness and therapeutic trajectories. Over the centuries, cross-cultural, reciprocal borrowing contributed to the development of healing kits employed by Africans and non-African outsiders alike, which were used and brokered by local communities in different locations in the region.

Demic and cultural diffusion propagated the Neolithic transition across different regions of Europe

The Neolithic transition is the shift from hunting–gathering into farming. About 9000 years ago, the Neolithic transition began to spread from the Near East into Europe, until it reached Northern Europe about 5500 years ago. There are two main models of this spread. The demic model assumes that it was mainly due to the reproduction and dispersal of farmers. The cultural model assumes that European hunter–gatherers become farmers by acquiring domestic plants and animals, as well as knowledge, from neighbouring farmers. Here we use the dates of about 900 archaeological sites to compute a speed map of the spread of the Neolithic transition in Europe. We compare the speed map to the speed ranges predicted by purely demic, demic–cultural and purely cultural models. The comparison indicates that the transition was cultural in Northern Europe, the Alpine region and west of the Black Sea. But demic diffusion was at work in other regions such as the Balkans and Central Europe. Our models can be applied to many other cultural traits. We also propose that genetic data could be gathered and used to measure the demic kernels of Early Neolithic populations. This would lead to an enormous advance in Neolithic spread modelling.

Claiming space for an engaged anthropology: spatial inequality and social exclusion

I use the concept of “engaged anthropology” to frame a discussion of how “spatializing culture” uncovers systems of exclusion that are hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other methodological approaches. “Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology” is doubly meant: to claim more intellectual and professional space for engagement and to propose that anthropology include the dimension of space as a theoretical construct. I draw on three fieldwork examples to illustrate the value of the approach: (1) a Spanish American plaza, reclaimed from a Eurocentric past, for indigenous groups and contemporary cultural interpretation; (2) Moore Street Market, an enclosed Latino food market in Brooklyn, New York, reclaimed for a translocal set of social relations rather than a gentrified redevelopment project; (3) gated communities in Texas and New York and cooperatives in New York, reclaiming public space and confronting race and class segregation created by neoliberal enclosure and securitization.

Fitting in: the roles of social acceptance and discrimination in shaping the daily psychological well-being of Latino youth

OBJECTIVES

We examine how acculturation experiences such as discrimination and social acceptance influence the daily psychological well-being of Latino youth living in newly emerging and historical receiving immigrant communities.

METHODS

We use data on 557 Latino youth enrolled in high school in Los Angeles or in rural or urban North Carolina.

RESULTS

Compared to Latino youth in Los Angeles, Latino youth in urban and rural North Carolina experienced higher levels of daily happiness, but also experienced higher levels of daily depressive and anxiety symptoms. Differences in nativity status partially explained location differences in youths’ daily psychological well-being. Discrimination and daily negative ethnic treatment worsened, whereas social acceptance combined with daily positive ethnic treatment and ethnic and family identification improved, daily psychological well-being.

CONCLUSIONS

Our analysis contributes to understanding the acculturation experiences of immigrant youth and the roles of social context in shaping adolescent mental health.

Human capital and interethnic marriage decisions

Common explanations for the generally negative relationship between education and ethnic endogamy include (1) education makes immigrants and their children better able to adapt to native culture thereby eliminating the need for a same-ethnicity spouse and (2) education raises the likelihood of leaving ethnic enclaves, thereby decreasing the probability of meeting potential same-ethnicity spouses. This paper considers a third option, the role of assortative matching on education. If education distributions differ by ethnicity, then spouse-searchers may trade similarities in ethnicity for similarities in education when choosing spouses. U.S. Census data on second-generation immigrants provide strong support for the assortative matching mechanism.

Who has time for Ćejf? Postsocialist migration and slow coffee in neoliberal Chicago

The official end to communism in Eastern Europe marked the onset of major migratory movements. Perhaps the most abrupt of these population shifts was the displacement of more than two million people in Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Much of the existing literature on refugee migration has focused on victimization and citizenship claims. Alternatively, I draw on ethnographic research among Bosnian refugee-immigrants in Chicago to examine how a group of adult women migrants used one commodity - coffee - to manage and evaluate their displacements. The kind of slow-coffee drinking described here is informed by an ethics of consumption developed under Yugoslav socialism, nostalgias for pre-Yugoslav Islam and pre-Ottoman Bosnia, and exposure to U.S. neoliberalism. Placing consumption at the center of analysis reveals the structural constraints of the postconflict period and brings to light refugees’ active navigations of everyday life and society in their postsocialist present, lived out as refugees in the United States.

Football and post-war reintegration: exploring the role of sport in DDR processes in Sierra Leone

Growing enthusiasm for 'Sport for development and peace' (SDP) projects around the world has created a much greater interest among critical scholars seeking to interrogate potential gains, extant limitations and challenges of using sport to advance 'development' and 'peace' in Africa. Despite this interest, the role of sport in post-conflict peace building remains poorly understood. Since peace building, as a field of study, lends itself to practical approaches that seek to address underlying sources of violent conflict, it is surprising that it has neglected to take an interest in sport, especially its grassroots models. In Africa, football (soccer) in particular has a strong appeal because of its popularity and ability to mobilise individuals and communities. Through a case study on Sierra Leone, this paper focuses on sports in a particularly prominent post-civil war UN intervention—the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) process—to determine how ex-youth combatants, camp administrators and caregivers perceive the role and significance of sporting activities in interim care centres (ICCS) or DDR camps. It argues that sporting experiences in ddr processes are fruitful microcosms for understanding nuanced forms of violence and healing among youth combatants during their reintegration process.

Toward a Caribbean psychology: an African-centered approach

Although the Americas and Caribbean region are purported to comprise different ethnic groups, this article’s focus is on people of African descent, who represent the largest ethnic group in many countries. The emphasis on people of African descent is related to their family structure, ethnic identity, cultural, psychohistorical, and contemporary psychosocial realities. This article discusses the limitations of Western psychology for theory, research, and applied work on people of African descent in the Americas and Caribbean region. In view of the adaptations that some people of African descent have made to slavery, colonialism, and more contemporary forms of cultural intrusions, it is argued that when necessary, notwithstanding Western psychology’s limitations, Caribbean psychologists should reconstruct mainstream psychology to address the psychological needs of these Caribbean people. The relationship between theory and psychological interventions for the optimal development of people of African descent is emphasized throughout this article. In this regard, the African-centered and constructionist viewpoint is argued to be of utility in addressing the psychological growth and development of people of African descent living in the Americas and Caribbean region.

Don't ask me where I'm from: thoughts of immigrants to Catalonia on social integration and cultural capital

Once you get here, you realize that thinking Foucault was writing for you was terribly naïve, since in reality I did not exist as a subject for anyone like Foucault, or if I did it was only as an object of study’, recalls one of the protagonists in this essay, a collage of fragments of interviews with foreign immigrants from impoverished countries who have settled in Barcelona and other Catalan towns in recent years. Widespread prejudice in the host society dictates that these people are generalized as being on a lower cultural level, anonymous members of the growing mass of immigrants prepared to work at any price. The prejudice seems to be confirmed by the fact that the great majority of them do low-skilled or unskilled work in sectors such as the building trade, hotels and restaurants and domestic service. The reality, however, is very different. The average level of formal education of these immigrants is similar to that of the host population. It is the precariousness of their legal status or the often insurmountable barriers preventing recognition of their academic and/or professional qualifications, or simply cultural prejudice, that condemn them to accept jobs well below their personal potential. Thus, the host society wastes social and cultural capital of the first order, and lays foundations for a permanent division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This essay offers a modest but revealing sample of the quality and diversity of the ideas and viewpoints of the immigrants themselves, an asset we continue to at best underestimate or more often ignore altogether.

Bridges to nowhere: hosts, migrants, and the chimera of social capital in three African cities

Interest in migrant social networks and social capital has grown substantially over the past several decades. The relationship between “host” and “migrant” communities remains central to these scholarly debates. Recently urbanized cities in Africa, which include large numbers of “native-born” or internal migrants, challenge basic presumptions about host/migrant distinctions informing many of these discussions. Using comparable survey data from Johannesburg, Maputo, and Nairobi, we examine 1) the nature of social connectedness in terms of residence and nativity characteristics; and 2) the relationship between residence and nativity characteristics and three measures of trust within and across communities. Our findings suggest that the host/migrant distinction may not be particularly revealing in African cities where domestic mobility, social fragmentation and the absence of bridging institutions result in relatively low levels of trust both within and across communities. These findings underscore the need for new concepts to study “communities of strangers” and how people strategize their social mobility in urban contexts.

Composition, concentration and deprivation: exploring their association with social cohesion among different ethnic groups in the UK

Although studies in the US have shown an association between the ethnic residential composition of an area and reports of decreased social cohesion among its residents, this association is not clear in the UK, and particularly for ethnic minority groups. The current study analyses a merged dataset from the 2005 and 2007 Citizenship Survey to assess the evidence for an association between social cohesion and ethnic residential concentration, composition and area deprivation across different ethnic groups in the UK. Results of the multilevel regression models show that, after adjusting for area deprivation, increased levels of social cohesion are found in areas of greater ethnic residential heterogeneity. Although different patterns emerge across ethnic groups and the measure of social cohesion used, findings consistently show that it is area deprivation, and not ethnic residential heterogeneity, which erodes social cohesion in the UK.

Reintegrating young combatants: do child-centred approaches leave children—and adults—behind?

This article uses recent experience in Angola to demonstrate that young fighters were not adequately or effectively assisted after war ended in 2002. The government's framework excluded children from accessing formal disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes, and its subsequent attempts to target children have largely failed. More critically the case of Angola calls into question the broader effectiveness and appropriateness of child-centred DDR. First, such targeting is inappropriate to distinct post-conflict contexts and constructs a 'template child' asserted to be more vulnerable and deserving than adult ex-combatants, which does little to further the reintegration of either group, or the rights of the child in a conflict context. Second, child-centred reintegration efforts tend to deny children agency as actors in their own reintegration. Third, such efforts contribute to the normalisation of a much larger ideational and structural flaw of post-conflict peace building, wherein 'success' is construed as the reintegration of large numbers of beneficiaries back into the poverty and marginalisation that contributed to conflict in the first place.

Understanding the occurrence of interracial marriage in the United States through differential assimilation

American society is undergoing unprecedented cultural changes in the 21st century. This social transformation began with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As the United States becomes more diverse, both racially and ethnically, equal access to a variety of social institutions and organizations becomes more challenging. With respect to marriage, popular media continually report the blurring of boundaries between racial and ethnic groups. As a result, there has been a tremendous increase in interracial dating and marriage over the past several decades. There are considerable differences between the occurrence of interracial dating and interracial marriage. Data suggest that there is a much higher level of interracial dating in comparison to interracial marriage. This research effort focuses on trends in interracial marriages in the United States between 1980 and 2006. Information from the U.S. Census Bureau was used to analyze changes in the number and frequency of interracial marriages in American society over a 22-year time frame. Differential assimilation is employed for understanding interracial marriage trends and distinguishing important statistical differences between marriages with a Black spouse and those interracial marriages not involving a Black spouse. This exploration provides important empirical findings for assessing the progress of assimilation in America.

Cosmopolitanism, geographical imaginaries and belonging in North London

Cosmopolitanism has been described as the cultural habitus of globalisation. It is therefore, albeit defined somewhat loosely, often associated with ethnically diverse, global cities. This paper considers the extent to which London engenders cosmopolitan values amongst its residents. It draws on survey data from the LOCAL MULTIDEM study of minorities' political participation to address these themes. The analysis examines perceptions of respect, belonging and geographical imaginaries - amongst established minorities and the ethnic majority - in north London. It is argued that cosmopolitan ethics are transformative and dialectical and, critically, cannot remain the preserve of the privileged in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. The analysis presented demonstrates that a sense of belonging and cosmopolitan imaginaries are not evenly accessed by different ethnic groups; notably, that Bangladeshi Londoners who are born and bred in the city are less likely to appropriate these discourses than Caribbean, Indian or White residents.

Housing supply and residential segregation in Ireland

The article examines the role of housing supply in ethnic diversity and the residential segregation of Asian, African and eastern European immigrants from Irish nationals in Ireland. Housing supply is defined as the proportions of new housing, private rental accommodation and social housing among all housing units in an electoral district. Multivariate regressions reveal that, among all three housing supply variables, the proportion of private rentals had the largest effect on ethnic diversity and immigrant— Irish segregation. Areas with higher proportions of private rental units were more ethnically diverse, had greater presences of Africans, Asians and eastern Europeans (as opposed to high concentrations of Irish nationals) and exhibited greater integration between each of the three immigrant groups and Irish nationals. The article concludes with a discussion of immigrant assimilation and questions whether the patterns of residential integration observed would further facilitate other forms of social inclusion for immigrants in Irish society.

Emigrant psychoanalysts in the USA and the FBI archives

Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The "émigré research" shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of "loss" of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambivalent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of themselves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.

"Bildung" or the formation of the psychoanalyst

As a number of Sigmund Freud's patients and followers in the crucial formative years of psychoanalysis were from the German- and Austrian-Jewish educated class, and as the then prestigious humanistic tradition was considered essential for the formation of analysts, the paper gives a historical account of various discourses of "Bildung"so as to explain the particularity of the Freudian psychoanalyst. Amongst others, his humanistic aspirations are compared with Thomas Mann's re-examination of the tradition of "Bildung." It is argued that Freud's specific cultural milieu -- the German-Jewish assimilation -- conditioned the form his psychological knowledge adopted and the way the analyst was fashioned: the demand of breaking away from one's alienating individuality by the objectifying effect of a symbolic system. The Freudian ideals of purity and neutrality, the Freudian method of self-formation, and the Freudian expert subject thus produced were historically and culturally determined and thus subject to variation.