99. Appropriating Trauma: Legacies of Humanitarian Psychiatry in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina – by Peter Locke, Princeton University

From the introduction: Prior to the 1990s, health components of humanitarian responses to wars and disasters were dominated by a narrowly biomedical approach, emphasizing biological and physiological needs and pharmaceutical treatments (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Powell 2000: 19; Richters 1997; Pupavac 2004).  In the last two decades, however, beginning especially with humanitarian engagements in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, aid projects targeting the mental health consequences of violence and disaster—commonly known as "psychosocial support"—have become key elements of international post-crisis remediation efforts (Pupavac 2001, 2003, 2004a; Summerfield 1998, 1999).

Humanitarian psychiatry, like other experiments in aid, development, and nation-building, introduces new or reconfigured social scientific and clinical rationalities into local discourse and social dynamics, producing side effects that ripple beyond program intentions.  Following the theme of this issue, in what follows I briefly sketch some of the ambiguous legacies and appropriations of trauma psychiatry in Bosnia.

This is my attempt to provide a case study in how social scientific theories and epistemologies can be unpredictably appropriated and adapted according to social dynamics specific to local contexts.  While these phenomena remind us that the appropriation of academic knowledge for application in new projects and contexts is a basic and inevitable social process, they also suggest the tremendous challenges (for anthropologists and others) in thinking through how this process could be better anticipated, accounted for, and managed.

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