Crises of Commitment: Ethics of Intimacy, Kin, and Confinement in Global Psychiatry

Abstract

This article addresses the challenges inherent to framing an ethical language around the issue of patient “abandonment” in psychiatric hospitals. It describes the situations of divorced women in a north Indian private clinic to ask how a Foucaultian understanding of “the family” as a site of discipline, and the ethical languages that emerge from this critique, cannot account for the complexities of kin life in these women's lives and the multiple legal domains that shape them as subjects.

Key Words:

• abandonment
• biopower
• India
• kinship
• psychiatry
• women

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful to Rachel Newcomb, Susana Trnka, and Diya Mehra, and to the editors of Medical Anthropology, for thoughtful comments on drafts of this essay.

Notes

I am indebted to Thomas Strong and Gretchen Pfeil for his invitation to participate in a panel called “Privates/Counterprivates” which started me on this line of thinking.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Pinto

SARAH PINTO is an assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University, where she specializes in medical anthropology, gender, and South Asia. Her publications include Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (Berghahn 2008), and she is co-editor of Postcolonial Disorders (University of California Press 2008). Recent research involves women in psychiatric care in north India and subjectivities formed at the juncture of law and medicine. She may be reached at the Anthropology Department, Tufts University, 126 Curtis Street, Medford, MA 02155, USA. E-mail: [email protected]