Talk by Anu Ahmed (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

The Republic of Maldives has been undergoing rapid social transformations since the country’s democratization in 2008. A decade later yielded the Maldives’ ‘psy’ turn when, starting at the end of 2018, the incoming President prioritized mental health care as the focus of his modernization project. Public and private services offering psychiatry have since proliferated, and psychopharmaceuticals today circulate rapidly through formal and informal networks. How is this state-sponsored “biotechnical embrace” (Delvecchio Good 2007) lived? Many Sunni-Maldivian individuals describe psychopharmaceuticals as a medical technology that assists in containing what are deemed excessive subjectivities, while many others criticize psychopharmaceuticals as producing the very excesses that it is meant to contain. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives from mid-2020 through 2021, this talk explores how patients and kin navigate these competing discourses in an urban landscape that is unevenly marred by histories of dispossession and structural violence. Through person-centered narratives, this talk shows how the institutionalization of psychopharmaceuticals has reconfigured what counts as illness and care in the present as well as in the proximate and distant past. Attending to these entangled temporalities in individuals’ narratives illuminates how psychopharmaceutical technologies provide “ethical affordances” (Keane 2015) through which people posit themselves and others as moral persons in the contemporary moment.

Anu Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. She is a medical and psychological anthropologist who examines how people understand and experience subjective distress, such as madness, and how emergent institutions and cultural discourses shape new moral and phenomenological worlds. Her work is situated in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives, where she was born and raised.