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Occupations are foundational to the making and reproduction of many 'modern' nation-states. They are not exceptional forms of state power, but rather, constitutive of state-making in several South Asian nation-states [...]

This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call "bearing witness" and "denunciation/confession." In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided dialogue, we demonstrate the multiple responsibilities and relationalities that come with the positions we occupy as subjects, researchers, and narrators of empire. We define complicity as an active, transitive engagement with others as we are situated in multiple structures of power. Theorizing complicity helps us reveal what relations of knowledge and power we are responsible for making visible and how we can analytically respond to them. By pluralizing complicity, our aim is to stimulate much needed conversation on questions of anthropology's relation to tentacles of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on iatrogenesis that does not limit it to medical explanations alone, nor locate harm in singular points in time. These papers attend to iatrogenesis' immediate and lingering presences in socialities and structures within and beyond medicine, and the ways it reflects or reproduces the racism, sexism, and ableism built into medical logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The counter-ethic is that I something i that prevents the ethic's own completion: its potentiality lies I in i , not I in spite of i , the way it "gives form to the claims and limitations" of the ethic (Pinto, 2020, p. 181). Contra what he described as Freud's "unscientific" method of free association, Satya Nand developed a complex "correlative" method, composed of "dream smudges', which might break a person's life experiences into segments they could associate with the themes generated by the [day]dream" (Pinto, 2020, p. 11), which were then reorganized into "long chains of association" including "mythic plot points in epic stretches" (Pinto, 2020, p. 87). Though the long passages of complex associations are certainly "where we are meant to look" (Pinto, 2020, p. 87), Pinto deftly guides our attention elsewhere, namely, to the conversations between Satya Nand and Mrs. At one point, Pinto describes the counter ethical as a "pocket of air...that bubble[s] precisely from the infrastructure of the ethic" (Pinto, 2020, p. 181). [Extracted from the article]

In this article, we trace encounters between humans and phantasmic entities in hospitals in Indian-occupied and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In Pakistan, the presence of spectral beings (jinni) in hospitals is linked to state and sectarian violence, which precipitates ruptures between jinni and human worlds. Such breaches permit jinni to manifest in the medical present, where insecure actors harness them to ventriloquize unspoken anxieties. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, jinn-like, chronically mentally ill patients haunt psychiatric modernization projects. In embracing a jinneaological approach to medical crises, we theorize hospitals as multi-temporal and multi-dimensional spaces called "tesseracts," in which human-nonhuman encounters serve existential and political purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In article the author talks about the prevalence of thoughts of people related to the emotional and psychological association of the COVID-19 pandemic and War. Topics include that war conveys urgency, unites people against a common enemy and increases morale among healthcare workers and law enforcement personnel; and that such unity can disguise racial disparities and other immoral and illegal activities such as counterfeiting during the pandemic.

In recent years, the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) and the World Health Organization have worked closely with governments across the global South to redress major treatment gaps to improve access to mental health services. In India, recent reforms include transforming public psychiatric institutions from sites of treatment to research and training institutes, known as “Centres of Excellence,” to combat acute manpower shortages and modernize psychiatry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a public psychiatric hospital in Srinagar, Kashmir, one of the institutions selected to be a future “Centre of Excellence,” this article focuses on how these reforms have affected psychiatric institutions themselves. Efforts at modernizing and increasing access to mental health care—that is, emphasizing shortened stays, increasing outpatient treatment, and providing care in the “community”—depend on quarantining stigmatized, chronically ill, long-term patients who reside in custodial conditions with fewer resources and limited attention from providers. Psychiatrists have a radically different vision for redressing manpower shortages than the MGMH and Indian state, revealing contradictions in the reform process. This paper demonstrates how modernizing mental health care splits mental institutions spatially, ontologically, temporally, and epistemologically, so that the process of modernizing the institution is neither seamless nor complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]