Situating selves: ‘self-illness’ (nafsānī bali) and living ethical ‘modern’ lives in Contemporary Male’, Maldives
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Abstract
In the Indian Oceanic South Asian nation of Maldives, nafsānī bali (lit. ‘self illness’) has long been a cultural category of (ill) personhood among Sunni-Maldivians. Various modernization projects that have been underway since the nation’s democratization in 2008 offer new frameworks through which Sunni-Maldivian persons today interpret this category of experience. Drawing on 22 cumulative months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives, this study asks: How do Sunni-Maldivians experiencing self-illness and their kin construct themselves as ethical ‘modern’ persons in this contemporary moment? Each of the chapters explore a significant intersection of the various public discourses of ‘modernity’—such as reformist Sunni-Islam, biopsychiatry, humanitarian mental health, and liberal feminism—and how these discourses offer new ways to conceptualize inner processes, such as emotion and sense of moral self. Significantly, the experience-near narrative approach employed throughout the ethnography highlights how people transform discourses just as they are being transformed by them. Through detailed narrative analysis of data gathered from discursive-centered and person-centered ethnographic methods, this ethnography illuminates (1) how long-existing idioms of distress can transform during periods of rapid social change; (2) how individual subjectivities are intimately entangled with these broader processes of social change; and (3) how situating selves in their local sociomoral worlds can refine our existing understandings of concepts such as “madness” and “recovery.” The expansive understanding of Sunni-Maldivian personhood illustrated in this ethnography contributes to the literature on Global Mental Health, studies of South Asian and Muslim subjectivities, and the anthropological project of documenting an ethics of everyday life.
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2024