Peru is currently undergoing an important institutional transition regarding mental health. Since 2016, the government has started transitioning state-sponsored treatment for several mental illnesses from an asylum/institutionalization model to a community mental health model. To effectively address mental health afflictions and other psychosocial conditions in the wake of de-institutionalization, the goal is to build at least one hundred community mental health centers around the country. Thus far, twenty-nine have been built. This reform also aims to place mental health in the public agenda and address the stigma surrounding mental illness. In this paper, I present the case of the community mental health center in Carabayllo, the “flagship” facility of the ongoing reform, located in a poor semi-urban district at the outskirts of Lima, Peru. Drawing from three months of fieldwork and interviews with psychiatrists, community mental health workers and residents of Carabayllo, I argue that this transitional moment provides insight into the dynamics that arise in the community when total institutions start to fade away. I explore residents’ reflections on this transition, considering in particular the anxieties they express over the proximity of mental illness and the symbolic and spatial dimensions they reveal of the relationship between clinic and community. With the asylum reconfiguring and the community-based model spreading in the city through its different agents, I signal the diverse challenges the residents of Carabayllo articulate against the closeness of mental illness and the extension of the clinic.

Proximity and Suspicion: The Transition to Community Mental Health in Lima, Peru

New and Emerging Perspectives in the Anthropology of Mental Health II

technical paper

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Julio Villa-Palomino

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Proximity and Suspicion: The Transition to Community Mental Health in Lima, Peru

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