Grammars of Crisis: Emergent Conceptions of Madness and Responsibility in Sunni-Islamic Maldives by Anu Ahmed

Jesse L. Rosenberger Work-in-Progress Seminar Series: Grammars of Crisis: Emergent Conceptions of Madness and Responsibility in Sunni-Islamic Maldives by Anu Ahmed

Research Overview:

I am a medical and psychological anthropologist broadly interested in ethics/morality and cultural practices of self-cultivation. Using narrative and linguistic anthropological approaches, my work attends closely to the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of experience.

My most recent project explores how Maldivians experiencing madness and/or mental illness, and their kin, construct themselves as ethical ‘modern’ persons in a contemporary moment shaped by a multiplicity of modernization discourses. Taking a critical phenomenological approach to the study of personhood, this work examines (1) the intersections of public discourses—such as reformist Sunni-Islam, Global Mental Health, and liberal feminism—and the novel ways of conceptualizing subjective processes, such as emotion, illness, recovery, and sense of moral self; and (2) the (mental) health (in)equities produced by international and national structural forces, especially as they pertain to the gendered and classed experiences of those living with madness and/or mental illness.