Shame and Medical History Seminar (Online)

Dr Daria Schwalbe (University of Copenhagen)

‘The Culture of Silence: Sexual Violence and Shame.’

The seminar is jointly sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health and the Wellcome Trust funded Shame and Medicine Project at the University of Exeter

TITLE

‘The Culture of Silence: Sexual Violence and Shame.’

ABSTRACT

It has been repeatedly pointed out that the long-term psychological consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic might still be underway, as the massive and complicated nexus of emotions and pain is only beginning to be understood. In the Arctic, the virus was not very widespread; and Greenland managed particularly well to control the pandemic, and the imposed social isolation measures were limited. Yet, the numbers of suicide threats and cases of sexual and other forms of violence were reported to increase in Greenland, as well as across North American Arctic, particularly after the first wave of the pandemic. In this talk, I explore emotional responses and psychological consequences of the pandemic for the Arctic communities. Further, by looking at assumptions about suicide, culture and cure, embedded in therapeutic and health discourses, I scrutinize the role of culture and context for mental health in Greenland. I will also talk about the danger of the ‘silent culture’ (in Danish, ‘tavseskultur’), ascribed to Inuit (and Sami) societies, and the possible side effects of the ‘culture of confession,’ which prevails in contemporary health care and media discourses, and which assumes that ‘talking’ is the only possible cure and hence, the only rational solution to mental health problems in the Arctic. In my talk, I question this universal idea, arguing that to change the current mental health challenges in the Arctic, we need to change the framework of understanding suffering experiences in relation to the conditions for people’s lives.

Bio

Daria Schwalbe is a linguistic anthropologist, who works in the intersection of indigenous studies, medical humanities and distributed cognitive science (cognitive ethnography). She is preoccupied with understanding the relationship between cultural context, human interaction and cognitive processes, and with how cultural factors and language effect human behavior and thinking. Currently she is working on the project that explores the effects of covid-19 pandemic on mental health in Russia and the Arctic.

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The event will be recorded and published on the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health YouTube channel, so by attending you acknowledge you may be recorded. To maintain privacy, you are welcome to join the meeting with video turned off.

If you have any questions, please contact info@shameandmedicine.org.

This event was funded in part by the Wellcome Trust [217879/Z/19/Z].