Tension: an ethnographic study of women's mental distress in rural North India (original) (raw)
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Tension Among Women in North India: An Idiom of Distress and a Cultural Syndrome
The existing literature on Indian ethnopsychology has long asserted that somatization is a key aspect of experiences of distress. The study of idioms of distress arose out of work done in India (Nichter in Cult Med Psychiatry 5(4):379–408, 1981), but ironically, little subsequent work has systematically explored idioms of distress in this part of the world. This ethnographic study focused on the term tension (tenśan) and its relation to a cultural syndrome among women in urban North India. This syndrome appears to involve rapid-onset anger, irritation, rumination, and sleeplessness as key symptoms. It is often linked to specific circumstances such as domestic conflict and is associated with the stresses of modern urban life. People who report more symptoms of tension had consistently higher scores on the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist-25 for depression and anxiety. In this cultural context where psychiatric care is highly stigmatized, the language of tension can aid providers of mental healthcare (many of whom, in India, are not psychiatrists or psychologists) to identify and communicate effectively with potential patients whose mental healthcare needs might otherwise go unaddressed.
TRIBAL WOMEN IN INDIA: POPULAR RHETORIC AND LIVED REALITIES
Romanian Journal of Social Sciences, 2019
Popular rhetoric on gender relations in tribal societies in general, and the status of tribal women in particular, swings between two uncompromising extremes. While the development administrators and some selected NGOs perceive an impressive state of empowerment of tribal women, thanks to the post-independence developmental interventions, their critiques, on the other hand, highlight their destitution in more than one instances. Looking at these mutually antagonistic paradigms, I contend that tribal gender relations have not yet received critical attention, which is due to them. As I have been arguing for quite some time now, it is not prudent to assert a rigid Cartesian dichotomy between a 'higher' and a 'lower' status of a tribal woman vis-à-vis a tribal man. Contrarily, I suggest, it is a mixed bag of specificities and complexities that needs critical examination without being tempted to make a sweeping generalization. I intend to discuss in this paper how economic self-sufficiency and structural dependence, ritual power-holding and ritual segregation, submissiveness and stiff resistance to domination, etc. are witnessed in the life of a tribal woman that should refrain us from looking at status as a monolithic entity rather than as a dynamic one. Despite an impressive growth in global anthropology in terms of the quantity of research output, the quality of its research contents, and the applications of its research findings, sometimes I tend to believe that Indian anthropology is still brooding over its colonial hangover and continue in a state of uncritical romantic self. Far from being senile I am fully conscious that I am writing this for a galaxy of my own anthropological fraternity the world over and in India, without whose priceless contributions, anthropology in India would have been in a state of oblivion today. Nevertheless, I feel, a sense criticality in looking at the empirical
“A woman’s life is tension”: A gendered analysis of women’s distress in poor urban India
Transcultural Psychiatry
The mental health of women living in poverty is a growing public health concern, particularly in India where the burden of illness is compounded by critical shortages in mental health providers and fragmented services. This was an exploratory study which sought to examine low-income women’s perceptions of mental illness and its management in the context of urban poverty in India. This research was prompted by the lack of empirical studies documenting how women in marginalized sections of society understand mental illness. Data were collected through a combination of 10 focus group discussions and two individual interviews with a total of 63 women residing in low-income areas of Mumbai. Social representations theory was used to explore shared meanings of mental illness among women in this setting. Thematic analysis of the data showed that women use the expression “tension” to talk about mental illness. Tension was described both as an ordinary part of life and a condition having its ...
Identities, affiliations and gendered vulnerabilities in the Mid-hills of West Bengal
Environmental Development, 2018
This paper explores the varied narratives of vulnerabilities faced by different groups of people in Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) region in the Darjeeling Hills, in West Bengal, shaped by their identities that are ever evolving. Identities come with deep-rooted structures of class, caste/ethnic group, history and geographic location. However, identities are not singular but multiple that continue to be influenced by both internal and external factors of development, politics and growing consumerism. Such new and changing social interactions give rise to new local level institutions, which often act as new arrangements of negotiation and agency for the communities, particularly for women and the most marginalized who do not have easy access to information, state or higher level decision-making. This study of gendered vulnerability in its different layers of identities and affiliations aims to show how such interlinkages and intersectionalities shape gendered and women's vulnerabilities and capacities in the face of climatic and socio economic changes resulting in the constant evolution of the communities in adapting/coping to climatic changes and external developments.
2008
Recent work in anthropology has translated systemic disjuncture to individual subjectivity, under the premise that disordered political economies cause disordered identities. However this work underplays the role of affect in gathering subjectivity amidst external transformation. The following thesis proposes a concept of mood as a set of conjoined, low-level affects that provides continuity in contexts of neoliberalism and change. It investigates women's moods in an urbanizing region of Uttarakhand, India. Drawing from ethnographic interviews in a village, and a migrant community, mood is shown to involve components of economic anxiety that articulate with attitudes of docility and duty. Experiences typically described as postmodern including incompleteness, estrangement and alienation, are common to, and produce classical gendered affects in both rural and urban settings. Although anxiety can be destabilizing, it joins paradoxically with these affects to lubricate women's sense of belonging in a place. * * * * * Des travaux récents en anthropologie décrivent la façon dont des disjonctions systémiques se traduisent au niveau de la subjectivité individuelle. La prémisse sur laquelle ils reposent est qu’une économie politique désordonnée produit une identité désordonnée. Cependant, ces travaux sous-estiment la manière dont l’affect rassemble la subjectivité à travers les transformations qui opèrent à l’extérieur. Cette recherche propose l’idée que l’humeur , en tant qu’elle constitue un ensemble d’affects reliés, opérant à bas bruit, procure un sentiment de continuité dans le contexte du changement néo-libéral. L’auteur examine plus spécifiquement les humeurs de femmes vivant dans une région en voie d’urbanisation de l’Uttarakhand, en Inde. En se basant sur des entrevues ethnographiques réalisées dans un village et dans une communauté migrante, elle montre la façon dont l’humeur intègre les composantes de l’anxiété associée au capitalisme et qui s’articulent par ailleurs avec les attitudes sexuées de docilité et de devoir. L’argument est que des expériences qui sont typiquement postmodernes, incluant un sentiment d’ incomplétude, d’étrangeté et d’aliénation, sont à la fois commune à, et produisent, des affects liés au sexe dans un contexte de perturbations sociales et économiques. Même si l’anxiété peut être déstabilisante, elle rejoint paradoxalement ces affects qui lubrifient le sentiment des femmes d’appartenir à un lieu.
2015
is an award winning bilingual poet, author of fiction and non-fiction works and critic. He has authored 30 books and has received several poetry awards, besides other honours from India and abroad. Many of his works have been translated in Indian and foreign languages and anthologised. There are half a dozen books which include discussions on his poetry. He has written essays on more than 30 scholarly books on literature and allied subjects like wildlife, Nature and environment. He has been in the editorial boards of some serious literary journals. He has participated in 30 national and international literary and tribal life conferences. He has travelled across Asia, Europe, America and Africa. Abstract It is an irony of human civilization that the most wealthy areas on earth are most impoverished; the people die of disease and hunger, live in ghettoes being driven out by the agents of civilization, who live thousands of miles away in air-conditioned rooms in sophisticated countries...
joell, 2018
The 'struggles' faced by women are portrayed in many literary works. Issues of women have also been voiced in public forums but the issues of tribal women have not been adequately represented. Tribal women face double marginalization of being a woman and also being part of an already oppressed class. The present paper thus attempts to illustrate and analyse the problems faced by the tribal women. The key question raised is-Is there really a serious issue for tribal women even after trying to secure them with new laws? The question is answered by comparing two short stories-Mahasweta Devi's The Hunt and Zora Neal Hurston's Sweat from two different continents. The texts used for analysis also project some tribal women characters who had the courage of raising their 'voices' against the existing social evils though being surrounded by the 'voiceless' masses.
Indian Women at Crossroads: A Tale of Conflict, Trauma and Survival
Armed conflict across and between communities results in massive levels of destruction to the people-physically, culturally, economically and psychologically. The genesis of most of the conflicts that has engulfed the northeastern states of India is either to preserve the unique identity or due to lack of economic development and opportunities for the large majority of the people or both. Women as heterogeneous group of social actors are arguably more affected than their male counterparts in conflict situations. Armed conflict exacerbates inequalities in gender relations that already exist in society. In an ethnically divided society in Assam, women bodies are generally used as 'ethnic markers' thereby have more specific manifestations. The paper aims to analyze the multiple roles that women are subjected to and play in armed conflict in the state of Assam. The paper is going to highlight that woman in NE India with a special reference to Assam cannot be categorized just as 'victims' of conflict. Even when they are victims; they exercise their agency and survival techniques despite adverse conditions. Beyond judicial measures, how women grapple with the problem of the 'truths' of the past in post conflict scenario will also be highlighted.
Drawing upon 15 months of research conducted in 2018–2019 in Bhaktapur, Nepal, this paper examines how middle-class women experience and make sense of gyāstrik (an umbrella term for multiple gut disorders) as an embodiment of social change. Enumerating dietary injustices and distress following unmet middle-class expectations of well-being and domestic intimacy as a primary cause of the condition, these women narratively problematised social norms and found ways out through the concomitant vocalisation of physical pain and social discontent. While illness epistemologies differ (with the persistence of mind-body dichotomies on the one hand and the centrality of notions of well-being and ideals of self-care on the other), these accounts demonstrate both a passive and active role of the gut in the social change experience, inviting to take the gut as the site where somatic modes of ‘attention’ and ‘action’ enable the navigation of personal life trajectories and the negotiation of social change itself.
CULTURE AND GENDER DYNAMICS IN THE CONTEXT OF TRIBES OF INDIA
AGPE The Royal Gondwana Research Journal of History, Science, Economic, Political and Social Science, 2022
Existing norms, belief systems, heritage, and customs all contribute to the formation of a society's culture. Society's culture varies by region. A society's established culture dictates gender roles and relationships. Gender is a western concept that refers to the division of labour in terms of male and female. This means that while sex is a biological term, gender is a social construct. Gender denotes the expected roles of men and women in the realms of production, reproduction, and power relations in various spheres of society. Culture evolves and changes to take on its current form. Thus, the factors that shape culture have a substantial effect on gender. India is the world's second-largest home to tribal people. There is a widespread perception that tribal women enjoy significantly more freedom in the workplace, decision-making, and empowerment than the women of other castes in society. Gender roles and relationships are not uniform across the country's tribal communities, but rather vary. Additionally, the process of mainstreaming, displacement, and globalisation have altered their traditional culture and gender relationships significantly. With the introduction and exposure to a modern economy, the concept of women empowerment is rapidly changing among tribes. With the exposure to a market-oriented economy and industrialised society played a significant role in altering tribal women's roles at home and in society. The present paper will throw light on the changing scenario of culture and gender relationships among the tribal communities of the country.