The state construction of affect: Political ethos and mental health among Salvadoran refugees

Global Mental Health and Adolescent Anxiety: Kin, Care and Struggle in New Mexico

“…Recalling Michelle Rosado's understanding of emotions as at once social and cultural, physical and psychological, sociological and individual, we also recognize persons not as individuals first but primarily as social persons (1984:151). This intersubjective framing of sentiment and person was argued by Jenkins (1991) with the formulation of ''political ethos'' whereby sentiment is shaped by social domains of power and interest, and psychological trauma understood at both personal and collective levels. The ethnographic study of grandmothers in Nicaragua by Kristin Yarris (2014) contributes to understandings of familial households headed by grandmothers charged with the care of children when mothers are absent in relation to the economic forces of migration.…”

What is called symptom?

“…The landscape however, is experienced, lived and felt by the patients and what is experienced are bodily sensations, not symptoms, and embodied reactions, not criteria. 14 Bodily sensations and the importance of attending to those in studying the experience of illness has been brought forward by several researchers within anthropology (Hinton and Hinton 2002;Jenkins 1991;Kirmayer 1996Kirmayer , 2007Kleinman and Kleinman 1994;Nichter and Nichter 2003) who state that the process of interpreting and organizing sensations into meaningful perceptions for both patient and healer are of particular relevance to the anthropology of medicine (Hinton et al 2008). Examining sensations means exploring what is felt by the body, how the body reacts to sensations and how these are e.g.…”

Commentary

“…In her study of Salvadoran women refugees living in exile in North America, the anthropologist Janis Jenkins (1991) found that all of the women were suffering from nervios, a cultural category that comprises dysphoria (anxiety, fear, anger), somatic complaints including non-specific pains and tremulousness and calorias (bouts of a subjective sensation of intense heat). Jenkins argues that these symptoms are not necessarily pathological but represent a culturally normal response to the abnormal conditions of political violence, terror and protracted civil war.…”