"Pessoas de linha": etnografia da experiência anormal

Abstract

This thesis advocates for an abnormal anthropology. Based on an extensive theoretical review of how cultural anthropology has approached “abnormality” and in dialogue with the contributions of Crip Theory, the anthropologies of mental health and disability, as well as Batesonian cybernetics, I argue for a shift from an “anthropology of the abnormal” to an “abnormal anthropology”. In this speculative move, abnormality ceases to be an object of anthropological knowledge and becomes understood as an event with which the anthropologist engages. Through this lens, I conduct an ethnography of the experiences of individuals hospitalized in a male psychiatric ward. Following “acute patients” in their practices of estranging reality reveals what the abnormal experience may contain of both destruction and creation; the psychiatric crisis is read in terms of its potential for social critique. “Estrangement” ceases to be an anthropological privilege and is instead understood as a diffuse practice through which these individuals denaturalize the real. Focusing on the discourses and practices in which patients engage both inside and outside medical consultations, I narrate the tensions between care and control in the hospital’s daily life. On one hand, the patients endure disciplinary restrictions typical of institutional confinement. On the other, they promote creative strategies in their search for habitability during their stay. I describe interspecies alliances between patients and the small animals that inhabit the ward’s courtyard. I discuss how patients negotiate their gender performances both with each other and with the psychiatric apparatus. I show how they subvert the hierarchy between psychiatrists and patients by mobilizing an “affective economy of distrust” and present how they appropriate psychiatric treatment, whether through spiritualization or by counterbalancing the "side effects" of psychotropic medications with the use of cigarettes and coffee. Finally, I understand psychiatric treatment as a cismogenetic process, sociotechnically supported by the intensive modulation of patients through psychotropic drugs, with the goal of reaching the “discharge point.” Throughout the thesis, the idea of “intensity” emerges as a central analytical category for understanding the experiences of individuals in psychiatric hospitalization.