[Symposium 20] How to make the real critical transculturel psychiatry in japan today

[SY-20-05] Beyond Perspectivalism: Problems (and Solutions) to the Study of “Spiritual Therapies”

*Ioannis Gaitanidis (Chiba University(Japan))

Keywords:

alternative therapies,spirituality,perspectivalism

In 2024, a medical anthropologist published a book-length study of the coronavirus pandemic in Japan, focusing particularly on the government’s strategies to curb the spread of the virus. While the author makes insightful arguments, the book’s conclusion calls for a reappraisal of the culture and personality school of thought, claiming that it is necessary to understand the ‘Japanese habit of thinking’, because any action plans devised in times of emergency need to reflect the underlying habits of thought of the targeted peoples. This trend to return to an essentialist perspective in understanding the relationship between culture and the practice of medicine has also been seen in studies of the “alternative” – folk, shamanistic or spiritual – therapies practised in contemporary Japan, and which I will critique in this paper. My argument is that, from Annemarie Mol’s warning that our understanding of disease should not be confined to the realm of meaning, ‘something relative to the specific perspective of the person talking’ (Mol, 2002, 12), to Anne Harrington’s anti-culturalist history (Harrington 2019) of how American psychiatry came to define a biological mission for itself, a return to the idea that there exists something called a ‘Japanese way of thinking’ risks bringing back the perspectivalism that 21^st century studies of disease have strongly criticized. I instead suggest that we rethink the connection between psychiatry and culture by taking into account the quintessential strive of all therapies to be particularly holistic, namely to present a simple cure for as wide an array of ailments as possible.

Harrington, Anne. 2019. Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. W.W. Norton.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press.