A Critical Approach to Abnormality 249market policies to appropriate the collective potential of these movements
is always on the horizon.
Rethinking Subjectivity through Frames of Indigeneity
The various trends outlined so far in this section illustrate how earlier
attempts to deinstitutionalize psychiatry have evolved into a broader
project of decentralizing mental health services on a global scale. While
this has undoubtedly provided obstacles to decolonizing psy-professions, it
has alternately allowed for the ‘normalization’ of certain subjectivities that
have historically been pathologized by psychiatry and other mental health
professions. By subjectivities, here, we mean the ways in which identity
and self-concept are co-created through shared cultural practices across
communities. There are, for example, countless examples throughout
Western history of subjectivities other than White, European ones being
labeled inferior or in some sense abnormal. The concept of the individual
self traditionally considered normal, in this sense, is a sort of cultural
remnant of the modernist philosophies of Descartes and Locke, for
instance, and notions of enlightenment rationality that emerged in Europe
around the sixteenth century and seventeenth century. In the ways outlined
at the beginning of this chapter, abnormal psychology has, largely
reflexively, taken on this normative ideal as the goal of treatment, while
alternatives to European cultural heritages are often pathologized.
In anthropology, the notion of the individual, as a self-contained
person, is sometimes contrasted with the notion of the dividual, which is
construed as a more amorphous and socially situated form of subjectivity.
Along these lines, the latter tends to be associated with non-Western, or
more indigenous ways of life. And yet, some anthropologists have recently
deconstructed conventional distinctions “between a Western ‘standard’ and
an ethnographic [e.g., indigenous] subject” on ethical as well as conceptual
grounds (Smith, 2012, p. 51). For instance: