lives and problems 95
fl ourish in the United States. Energetic and confi dent, he showed the signs of
someone who would become the leader of an organization or at least his own
boss. Sure enough, while I was conducting fi eldwork, Benny put his studies
on hold and opened his own healing center that combined aspects of Western
psychology, ayurveda, yoga, naturopathy and Christian teachings.
Benny was a little more insistent, but gently so, in getting people to talk
about their problems. Witness the quicker pace and shorter exchanges in
Benny’s interview with Mary that follows, compared to the exchanges in the
interviews involving Biju and Kavitha. Overall, Benny seemed to lead the
interview, while Biju and Kavitha would get the patient to lead.
When I left Kerala at the beginning of 1998, Benny had nearly completed
building his clinic, which he called Th anal Institute for Psychological Services.
On returning in 1999, I found that Th anal, which is in central Kerala in the
town of Kaladi, was doing brisk business for a place its size and that Benny
was quite busy. Along with his psychologist-assistant and nurses, Benny had a
combined caseload of about ten patients at a time. He reported to me that he
had success in healing people and was able to help patients who had unsuc-
cessfully sought treatment at other, more prestigious and established clinics.
All my assistants had some training in Western-style psychology, and I
wondered to what degree this might infl uence the course of our interviews
and the way we interpreted informants’ problems. All three assistants appeared
open-minded toward the perspectives of other healing systems, and, in fact,
they were all referred to me by friends and contacts whom I got to know
because of their interest in diverse forms of healing. Still, there was a tendency
in our early interviews to employ allopathic psychological and psychiatric
rubrics, to look for “depressive” or “schizophrenic” “symptoms” in our encoun-
ters with patients, for example. When I explicitly told my assistants that we
should try our best to avoid privileging allopathic and psychological categories
and assumptions in our work, I thought they made a good eff ort to ease up on
their psychological perspectives and check their use of psychiatric terminology.
Of course, our perspectives surely continued to be shaped by these and other
infl uences in ways we were not aware, but I feel we were able to de-center
our western/allopathic psychological assumptions to some degree. My assist-
ants’ eff orts at open-mindedness at times even led them to “overcompensate”
in their perspectives. Each assistant to varying degrees looked critically and
skeptically at allopathic psychiatry, and sometimes they celebrated, perhaps
romanticized, other forms of healing. Biju, for example, became an enthusi-
ast for the healing rituals at Chottanikkara and was often asking if we could
squeeze in just one more trip to the temple. Like Farmer’s (1992) observation
that Haitians are easily able to see the cultural and class assumptions behind