Relational Affliction: Reconceptualizing “Mass Hysteria”

Abstract

AbstractAn ethnographic exploration of “mass hysteria” in Nepal reconsiders existing anthropological treatments of this form of affliction as gendered resistance. In Nepal, affected communities and girls dispute psychosocial counselors and anthropologists on conceptual grounds. These conflicts revolve around two distinct understandings of the subject of affliction. The subject of “mass hysteria” takes a liberal feminist form in which symptoms reveal resistance to power, while for the subject afflicted by ghosts and spirits, bhut‐pret laagne, symptoms reveal the intertwined relationality between bodies and the world. I argue that by shifting attention away from questions of resistance, desire, and truth of the individual, we find that the concepts of chopne and bhut‐pret laagne are concerned with the transfer, sharing, and relationality of affliction. By placing Nepali and Euro‐American conceptualizations in dialogue, haunting is approached not as idiom or metaphor but as an analytic with which to construct new conceptual frameworks.[Nepal, hysteria, haunting, relationality]