Ana Vinea | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (original) (raw)

Articles by Ana Vinea

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2023

In 2009, Egypt adopted the "Law for the Care of Mental Patients," a rights-based legislation inte... more In 2009, Egypt adopted the "Law for the Care of Mental Patients," a rights-based legislation intended to bring the country's mental health system-otherwise defined by resource gaps and chronic underfunding-closer to global standards of care. Yet, the new act stirred dissension among Egyptian psychiatrists. And, in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 uprising, debates about the 2009 law became intertwined with debates about the present and future of the 'new Egypt.' Based on field research in Cairo, this article provides an ethnographic analysis of the making of this mental health act and of the ensuing debates as they unfolded in 2011-2012. Showing the diverging perspectives at the core of these debates on psychiatric power, patient rights, and the law's fit in society, the article highlights the challenges of psychiatric reform in a country of the Global South. It also argues that in a context of revolutionary upheaval, debates about psychiatric reform become a site for political reflection and provide a language for imagining the future of the nation. The article also highlights the centrality of temporality in debating psychiatric reform in times of political transformation.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2023

I use pseudonyms to protect my interlocutors' anonymity. I have also modified and/or omitted some... more I use pseudonyms to protect my interlocutors' anonymity. I have also modified and/or omitted some identifying details. I transliterate the Arabic letter ‫ﺟ‬ as the colloquial "g" when emphasizing local terminology.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2019

This article examines the notion of evidence (dalil) as it circulates in a revivalist religious t... more This article examines the notion of evidence (dalil) as it circulates in a revivalist religious therapy in contemporary Egypt to address current transformations of Islamic epistemologies, especially in relation to modern science. It focuses on Quranic healing, a Salafi-oriented therapy of spirit (jinn) exorcism that has become increasingly popular, visible, and debated in the public sphere beginning with the 1980s. By tracing the semantics and pragmatics of Quranic healing's evidentiary regime, the article shows that evidence is situated and crosses two domains of knowledge, bringing together a Salafi episteme that foregrounds unmediated induction from the Quran and sunna and forms of reasoning and practice, such as empiricism and experimentation, that pertain to modern science. In this manner, evidence functions like a hinge notion that hierarchically links the religious and scientific domains, giving precedence to the former over the latter. The article argues that the centrality of evidence in this novel Salafi therapy is indicative of an epistemology that unites Islam and science under a wider theory of knowledge as transparent, egalitarian, and public. This analysis suggests new ways of understanding Salafism beyond common depictions as critical of nontextual sources and intolerant of modern formations.

Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2018

This article examines the emergence and constitution of a new affliction category in contemporary... more This article examines the emergence and constitution of a new affliction category in contemporary Egypt: wahm, meaning (self-)illusion, locally defined as the condition of being falsely convinced one is possessed by spirits called ‘jinn’, all the while exhibiting real possession symptoms. As I show, wahm transcends the domain of revivalist Islamic healing from where it originates by mobilizing and entangling Islamic and psy concepts and practices. It both exploits the local dichotomy of jinn afflictions/mental disorders and grows from the cracking of this binary. In this manner, wahm provides a new idiom for critiquing current therapeutic practices, for understanding suffering, and for analyzing modern life in today’s Egypt. Through the analysis of wahm, this article contributes to scholarly investigations of ontology and the emergence of diseases by moving the lens from biomedical categories to the terrain where biomedicine meets religious healing, highlighting not only intersections but also the new formations they engender.

Book chapters by Ana Vinea

Beyond Cadfael: Medieval Medicine and Medical Medievalism, edited by Lucy C. Barnhouse and Winston Black, 2023

Book reviews by Ana Vinea

Other publications by Ana Vinea

Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise, 2022