Cultural Anxieties

Stéphanie Larchanché is the research and studies department coordinator at Centre Minkowska in Paris, and a lecturer at Université Paris Descartes and Sigmund Freud University. She lives in Saint Denis, France.

"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, Larchanché 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"Stéphanie Larchanché'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. Larchanché 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

• Foreword by Lenore MandersonList of Abbreviations / GlossaryIntroduction: Cultural AnxietiesA Day at Centre MinkowskaPart I   The Context   1          A Genealogy of "Migrant Suffering"                          2          Transcultural Practice at Centre Minkowska              Part II  Referral Narratives and Ethical Double-Binds3          Cultural and Linguistic Difference as Obstacles to Care                              4          Managing "Migrant Youth"Part III  Ethical Deliberations5          Enacting Cultural Competence6          Psychotherapy at the Borderland7          Beyond Anxieties: Praxis      ConclusionAcknowledgementsNotesBibliography  Index