Entretien avec le Professeur Arthur Kleinman

Abstract

PurposeArthur Kleinman is Professor of Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is a leading figure in medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global health and medical humanities. He is a China scholar. In addition to numerous collective works and articles, he has published six single authored books about his research. The purpose of this article is to make his work better known in France, for those interested in the links between medicine, psychiatry and the social sciences. MethodThe present article is the transcript, translated from English, of an interview with Arthur Kleinman, conducted in December 2017 at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. ResultsHe tells about his career and develops his research themes: the ethnographic study of the illness experiences of patients suffering from chronic diseases, the issues of psychiatric diagnosis in the field of cultural psychiatry, the approach of global health from the social sciences’ field, then the anthropological approach to care and its place in the contemporary medicine. DiscussionWhat medicine and psychiatry should learn from the social sciences? What is the situation of global mental health? What is the place of care in contemporary medicine and how to deal with the economic logic that dominates it? ConclusionThese different questions are approached through Arthur Kleinman's career and advocacy to open the field of medicine and psychiatry to the field of social sciences.