Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Murphy Halliburton

Committee Members

Vincent Crapanzano

Dána-Ain Davis

Sharika Thiranagama

Subject Categories

Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Sri Lanka, phenomenology, psychotherapy, gender, family

Abstract

Over the last three decades, Sri Lanka has seen a growing popular interest in psychology as a field of professional practice as well as a steady expansion of mental health services. Historically, this shift has been linked to the impacts of political violence (1971, 1987-1989), civil war (1983-2009) as well as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, with local and international trauma and humanitarian interventions shaping recovery and the country’s mental health and psychosocial care infrastructure. More recently, however, psychology and mental health have been increasingly decoupled from the discourse of trauma, entering into everyday life and popular culture through the growing presence of psychological counselling in both private and state settings. From the early 2000s, the Sri Lankan government began to incorporate psychological services into public education, the military and social welfare programs. As part of the latter, a nation-wide public counselling service was implemented through the existing infrastructure of district- and divisional-level government services. Across the country, Counselling Officers provide free counselling services and carry out mental health awareness programs in local communities, ranging from urban centers to remote villages. Focusing on the work of a group of these counsellors in one predominantly Sinhala-speaking district in Sri Lanka’s Central Province, in this dissertation I explore the counsellors’ practice and their perspectives on their work to trace how cultural as well as socio-political and economic realities infuse therapeutic care in this context. I argue that the counsellors redraw the contours of care, engendering new forms of therapeutic practice, which both encompass and unsettle dominant psychotherapeutic models of distress, selfhood and wellbeing. These new forms bring into relief the assumptions and hegemonic understandings of expertise embedded in dominant, globalizing iterations of psychotherapy, and at the same time, point to alternative moral imaginings of healing. Entwined with class and gender relations in the context of the social welfare system, the counsellors’ practice further reveals the gendered effects that psychological discourses produce as women become the primary providers and recipients of care.

In exploring therapeutic practice “against the grain,” this dissertation draws on phenomenological and ordinary ethics approaches as well as feminist theorizations of family life and care work to examine the textures of the counsellors’ embodied practice. These textures—what counselling feels and looks like—reflect shared cultural sensibilities, gendered ethical commitments, and the imprints of institutional and socio-economic structures. Drawing attention to the non-conscious and habitual forms of knowledge that underpin everyday social and ethical action, the concept of textures makes it possible to reframe both cultural difference and expertise. The former can be better understood in terms of affordances and attunement; the latter is revealed to encompass not only explicit disciplinary knowledge but also less clearly defined yet in practice highly salient forms of embodied knowledge such as attunements to particular modes of sociality, emotional self-expression and ethical action. For the counsellors, such knowledge includes specific gendered perspectives on family life, which anchor their moral attachments and shape their interventions in relation to normative family ideologies and middle-class notions of “upliftment.” Here, particular understandings of sociality and care not only trouble psychological models but also create openings for feminist analysis of women’s experiences and structural vulnerabilities in relation to the normative family. In the context of the global dominance of mental health discourses and the epistemologies they represent, this ethnography of state therapeutic care highlights how locally emergent forms of therapeutic practice unsettle, open up, and enrich contemporary global psy imaginaries.

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