Spectral Ties: Hospital Hauntings Across the Line of Control.

In this article, we trace encounters between humans and phantasmic entities in hospitals in Indian-occupied and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In Pakistan, the presence of spectral beings (jinni) in hospitals is linked to state and sectarian violence, which precipitates ruptures between jinni and human worlds. Such breaches permit jinni to manifest in the medical present, where insecure actors harness them to ventriloquize unspoken anxieties. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, jinn-like, chronically mentally ill patients haunt psychiatric modernization projects. In embracing a jinneaological approach to medical crises, we theorize hospitals as multi-temporal and multi-dimensional spaces called "tesseracts," in which human-nonhuman encounters serve existential and political purposes

The Medical Net: Patients, Psychiatrists And Paper Trails In The Kashmir Valley

This dissertation examines psychosocial interventions as specific social, political, medical, and ontological formations in the Kashmir valley. Till recently, medical humanitarianism was dominated by short-term, surgical interventions that focused on providing emergency biomedical care. In recent years, however, humanitarian organizations have increasingly focused on mental health interventions, particularly in places marked by low-intensity, long-term conflict, such as Kashmir. This dissertation traces the indeterminacies that have arisen as the outcome and effects of humanitarian work have shifted away from questions of life and death to the terrain of psychosocial wellbeing. Specifically, it argues that while humanitarianism is constituted by new subjects and objects of knowledge-such as psychiatrists, counselors, PTSD, and trauma therapies-it is also made up by less visible moments of (mis)translation, (mis)apprehension, and doubt. As such, I argue that medical humanitarianism takes the form of a "net" (jal), an object that is constituted by both its visible nodes and threads, as well as by "gaps" in between. Taking its inspiration from feminist science studies, the dissertation enacts the form of the net by moving from a focus on the visible nodes, that is, asylum and experts, to the threads that move between the clinic and the outside, namely medical cards and pills, to finally, the "gaps" in the net, that is, love stories. ! iii The "politics of visibility" that marks humanitarian practice is also replicated within the anthropology of humanitarianism. Anthropology has traditionally approached humanitarianism as providing the gift of life-in the form of citizenship, asylum, or legal residency-for victims of violence. Yet organizations that focus on psychosocial suffering do not hold out the promise of life as much as they provide limited techniques for living with suffering. Far from universally embraced, this latter gift raises questions about the worthiness of humanitarian endeavors in places of long-term suffering. This dissertation thus goes beyond a focus on humanitarianism as a "politics of life" to an ethnographically rich account of the everyday contestations and misapprehensions that characterize humanitarianism in a zone of political stagnation. ! i

Disappearing the asylum: Modernizing psychiatry and generating manpower in India.

In recent years, the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) and the World Health Organization have worked closely with governments across the global South to redress major treatment gaps to improve access to mental health services. In India, recent reforms include transforming public psychiatric institutions from sites of treatment to research and training institutes, known as "Centres of Excellence," to combat acute manpower shortages and modernize psychiatry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a public psychiatric hospital in Srinagar, Kashmir, one of the institutions selected to be a future "Centre of Excellence," this article focuses on how these reforms have affected psychiatric institutions themselves. Efforts at modernizing and increasing access to mental health care-that is, emphasizing shortened stays, increasing outpatient treatment, and providing care in the "community"-depend on quarantining stigmatized, chronically ill, long-term patients who reside in custodial conditions with fewer resources and limited attention from providers. Psychiatrists have a radically different vision for redressing manpower shortages than the MGMH and Indian state, revealing contradictions in the reform process. This paper demonstrates how modernizing mental health care splits mental institutions spatially, ontologically, temporally, and epistemologically, so that the process of modernizing the institution is neither seamless nor complete