Salle 737, 54 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris

Annu Jalais

Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore -  Professeure invitée de l'EHESS

Mental illness and suicides are very widespread in deltaic Bengal – especially in the Sundarbans region. One of the ways in which people fall prey to mental illness is through the ‘fear’ contracted after having seen or been in some sort of physical proximity with the nonhuman world. Following Descola and those who have worked on various forms of human-animal environments, my research explores the ‘nonhuman’ to discuss the natural world from the Sundarbans islanders’ point of view. When someone ‘catches fear’, that person is seen as needing to be cured of it lest it ends up disturbing the person’s mental well-being and potentially causing death. The ‘cure’ is usually provided by a ritual healer, customarily a person who also works in the forest, and is a ‘tiger-charmer’. Research in ethno-psychiatry suggests that ritual healing may actually be therapeutically effective. However, for one to be able to account for how it works in the case, for example, of human/nonhuman environments, one has to understand a particular cosmological worldview where nonhumans are seen as being part of a common world with humans and not one where they are seen as separate. My research delves into what ‘ecopsychiatry’ might mean from indigenous healers’ perspectives.