Psychiatry, Disaster, Security: Mediterranean Assemblages.

This article traces the development of a transnational psychiatric collaboration between psychiatrists and psychologists in Turkey and Israel in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck Turkey in 1999. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork in sites across the earthquake region, the project on which this article is based is concerned with how the Turkish mental health professionals who responded to the earthquake struggled to improvise a therapeutic response that could address the scale of psychological suffering precipitated by the earthquake. This article considers the development of a specific intervention in order to examine, first, the striking adaptability and mobility of these forms of psychiatric expertise and, second, their distinct capacity to draw together two divergent contexts-one characterized by the effects of a destructive seismic event, the other by a lasting politics of colonial occupation-into a common technical, psychiatrically constituted space. Tracing these transnational entanglements will offer a means for understanding the conditions of possibility for the circulation of medical expertise in the region and, with it, emerging transregional arrangements of psychiatry, disaster, and security.

Experiments in Scale: Humanitarian Psychiatry in Post-Disaster Turkey.

A massive earthquake that struck Turkey in 1999 generated an unprecedented mobilization of Turkish psychiatrists and psychologists to address the mental and emotional aftermath of the disaster. In this article I examine how these mental health professionals, swept up in a wave of humanitarian compassion, confronted the limits of their own expertise and struggled to improvise a therapeutic response that could match the scale of psychological suffering precipitated by the earthquake. Framing humanitarian and global health interventions as inescapably scalar projects, I explore the pragmatic and imaginative labor involved in making psychiatric expertise scalable, what I characterize as their "work of therapeutic scalability." In doing so, I raise a series of questions about the psychological subject of disaster, the transnational mobility of technoscientific expertise, and the politics of both life and scale at play in psychiatric humanitarian intervention.

The need to act a little more 'scientific': biomedical researchers investigating complementary and alternative medicine.

The advent of scientific research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has contributed to the current state of flux regarding the distinction between biomedicine and CAM. CAM research scientists play a unique role in reconfiguring this boundary by virtue of their training in biomedical sciences on the one hand and knowledge of CAM on the other. This study uses qualitative interviews to explore how CAM researchers perceive and negotiate challenges inherent in their work. Our analysis considers eight NIH-funded CAM researchers': (1) personal engagement with CAM, (2) social reactions towards perceived suspiciousness of research colleagues and (3) strategic methodological efforts to counteract perceived biases encountered during the peer review process. In response to peer suspicion, interviews showed CAM researchers adjusting their self-presentation style, highlighting their proximity to science, and carefully 'self-censoring' or reframing their unconventional beliefs. Because of what was experienced as peer reviewer bias, interviews showed CAM researchers making conciliatory efforts to adopt heightened methodological stringency. As CAM researchers navigate a broadening of biomedicine's boundaries, while still needing to maintain the identity and research methods of a biomedical scientist, this article explores the constant pressure on CAM researchers to appear and act a little more 'scientific'.

Ways of asking, ways of telling: a methodological comparison of ethnographic and research diagnostic interviews.

The interpretive understanding that can be derived from interviews is highly influenced by methods of data collection, be they structured or semistructured, ethnographic, clinical, life-history or survey interviews. This article responds to calls for research into the interview process by analyzing data produced by two distinctly different types of interview, a semistructured ethnographic interview and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM, conducted with participants in the Navajo Healing Project. We examine how the two interview genres shape the context of researcher-respondent interaction and, in turn, influence how patients articulate their lives and their experience in terms of illness, causality, social environment, temporality and self/identity. We discuss the manner in which the two interviews impose narrative constraints on interviewers and respondents, with significant implications for understanding the jointly constructed nature of the interview process. The argument demonstrates both divergence and complementarity in the construction of knowledge by means of these interviewing methods.

In the shadows of medicine and modernity: medical integration and secular histories of religious healing in Turkey.

Building upon the World Health Organization's recent publication WHO Strategy for Traditional Medicine (WHO 2002), this paper examines the historical position of "traditional medicines" at their intersection with the development and modernization of a biomedically based health care system in Turkey. This paper considers how the historical development of Turkey's health care system, as a prominent site for the articulation of the state's broader modernization project, sustained particular formulations of subjectivity and citizenship that were defined in opposition to a set of cultural practices and modes of religious-political authority represented by "traditional medicines." Consequently, projects and policies seeking to formally integrate "complementary" or "alternative" therapies directly confront this past and the various ways in which it is reenacted in constituting the present.