Stephanie Larchanche's Cultural Anxieties is a timely and compelling account not only of contemporary French politics of mental health, difference, and migration, but also of a broad and pervasive sense of anxious living which informs and shape the institutional practices of care and cure in many Western liberal democracies. Larchanche is particularly well positioned - both as a medical anthropologist and as a therapist - to reflect upon the work of anxiety within and outside clinical settings, providing an important ethnography of the contemporary.
-- Cristiana Giordano * author of Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy *
Cultural Anxieties offers a nuanced, thoughtful and engaged anthropological look at the management of cultural difference in a country where universalism is the national ideology. Taking the transcultural psychiatry clinic as a laboratory and a site of contestation, Larchanche refuses easy critiques, instead drawing attention to the difficult work of everyday care, and how it can build a politics of hospitality in the face of racism, injustice and inequality.
-- Miriam Ticktin * author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France *
Cultural Anxieties provides rich food for thought on a range of topics, but its greatest contribution lies in the book's nuanced analysis of the distinctive approach to cultural competence undergirding Centre Minkowska's work. A timely, fascinating, and vitally important ethnography that elegantly captures the heart of Centre Minkowska's ethos as well as its distinct approach to cultural competence. * EuropeNow *
Stephanie Larchanche's Cultural Anxieties is a timely and compelling account not only of contemporary French politics of mental health, difference, and migration, but also of a broad and pervasive sense of anxious living which informs and shape the institutional practices of care and cure in many Western liberal democracies. Larchanche is particularly well positioned - both as a medical anthropologist and as a therapist - to reflect upon the work of anxiety within and outside clinical settings, providing an important ethnography of the contemporary.
-- Cristiana Giordano * author of Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy *
Cultural Anxieties offers a nuanced, thoughtful and engaged anthropological look at the management of cultural difference in a country where universalism is the national ideology. Taking the transcultural psychiatry clinic as a laboratory and a site of contestation, Larchanche refuses easy critiques, instead drawing attention to the difficult work of everyday care, and how it can build a politics of hospitality in the face of racism, injustice and inequality.
-- Miriam Ticktin * author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France *
Cultural Anxieties provides rich food for thought on a range of topics, but its greatest contribution lies in the book's nuanced analysis of the distinctive approach to cultural competence undergirding Centre Minkowska's work. A timely, fascinating, and vitally important ethnography that elegantly captures the heart of Centre Minkowska's ethos as well as its distinct approach to cultural competence. * EuropeNow *
