Third Bank in the Psychiatric Hospital: Ethnographic strategy and minority affects.

Abstract

Those at the psychiatric hospital in the situation of patients would be too different to be studied by the discipline that think about the social difference? I will explore in this paper the possibility of doing ethnographic research with people who lives as patients of a psychiatric hospital. Initially, I will approach the relationship between anthropology and Cartesian philosophy. Then I will present what I called “third bank of the psychiatric hospital”, that is a strategic way of refusing to take a priori psychiatric diseases as satisfactory analytical categories for the problems of otherness. Therefore, I will explain my attempt to produce a decentred view of the mental health field involved in the treatment of institutionalized people due to the diagnosis of mental disorders. To give consistency to this methodological strategy, I will make an ethnographic description of activities performed by Aurora, patient of the psychiatric hospital in a way to indicate singular subjective agencies provided by minority affections.