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On 11th and 12th April 2019, the workshop “Power in Medicine: Interrogating the Place of Medical Knowledge in the Modern Middle East” will take place in Berlin. It is organized by Edna Bonhomme, Shehab Ismail, (both MPIWG) and Lamia Moghnieh (AUB, EUME) and will be convened by Europe in the Middle East—Middle East in Europe (EUME) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).  The workshop will examine the history and politics of medicine and  psychiatry in the Middle East from the 1800s until the contemporary  period.  Please find the workshop program here and the poster here. Christopher Dole is one of the workshop’s participants. Lamia Moghnieh conducted the interview.How would youdescribe your scholarship? Tell us about your work, research and most recentbook. &#160;Iam a medical anthropologist with broad interests in the relationship betweensuffering, healing, and politics. Turkey has been the principal setting for my research,and my current work extends a long-standing interest in religious andpsychiatric forms of therapeutic care, the production and distribution ofvulnerabilities in society, the intimacies of political economy, andethnographic and literary accounts of human flourishing.I am currently completing a project concerned with humanitarian psychiatry and the affective remains of catastrophe in Turkey. The project began with an interest in emerging models of psychiatric care in Turkey and developed, over time, into a project focused around the psychiatric response to a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999. Based on ethnographic research with earthquake survivors and a group of Turkish mental health professionals who provided humanitarian psychiatric care in the wake of the earthquake, the project examines the relationship between transnational forms of psychiatric expertise and long-term experiences of loss in a context marked by catastrophic destruction. Through tracing the effects of the earthquake and its psychiatric response in the lives of survivors, this project opens to a wider set of urgent questions regarding the sorts of lives forged—and forge-able—in contexts being profoundly remade by the combined influences of environmental and geological precarity, medical and technical forms of expertise, and shifting rationales and realities of governance.Myinterest in post-disaster psychiatry grew out of earlier research that exploredreligious forms of therapeutic care within economically marginalizedcommunities in urban Turkey. This work, which was the basis of my first book Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion inModern Turkey (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), explored the ways inwhich religious healing and secularism in Turkey can be understood as overlappingprojects of world and subject making. Grounded in long-term ethnographic andarchival research, the book approaches stories of healing and being healed assettings for examining the everyday social intimacies of secular politicalrule. With the completion of HealingSecular Life, my research interests in therapeutic care expanded intoclinical, psychiatric spaces. This was, in a sense, a very organic transition, inthat there is a great deal of exchange—from the point of view of patients—betweenreligious and psychiatric therapeutic traditions. As such, the new project notonly complements my previous work, but also fills it out in important ways. The PIM workshopaims to bring scholars in anthropology and history together from differentplaces in the Middle East to bridge theoretical and regional scholarship onmedicine and psychiatry in the Middle East. What has your work in bothdisciplines taught you? What kinds of conversations have emerged from workingin both history and anthropology?&#160;Thereare at least two ways in which my research stands at the disciplinaryentanglement of history and anthropology. The first is specific to my current project.The research for this project began quite literally in the ruins of the earthquake.At the time of the earthquake in 1999, I was conducting my dissertationfieldwork in Turkey. Although my current project wouldn’t begin in earnest untilseveral years later, the seed for it was planted with the earthquake and hascontinued to grow, on and off, for nearly 20 years. This has made the projectmuch more historical than I had initially anticipated. The span of this projecthas both allowed for a number of unexpected insights (I’ve been able to watch,for instance, as the earthquake has been transformed into an historical event)and presented a number of challenges (especially given the dramatic politicaltransformation in Turkey over recent years). Beyondthe specific conditions of my current project, I also see my research asembodying a far deeper disciplinary entanglement between anthropology andhistory. There’s a lot to be said here, but I’ll just note that it is nocoincidence that one of the most significant and influential theory courses Itook as a graduate student was taught by an historian. Given how muchanthropology and sociology feed off of one another, yet also challenge oneanother, this workshop is an extraordinarily exciting and important opportunityfor anthropologists and historians to think, together, in systematic ways aboutwhat we can offer one another.&#160; Based on yourexpertise, what are some of the debates emerging fromhistorical/anthropological research on psychiatry in the Middle East? What isunique about that field of study?Inmany ways, my work emerges out of a lasting, mutual fascination—andsuspicion—between anthropology and psychiatry. This relationship, built out ofour shared interest in the remarkable variability of human experience, hasgiven rise to a rich and complex conversation that has spanned generations ofanthropologists and psychiatrists. Although this conversation has waned inrecent decades—for many reasons, in both fields—the history of thisrelationship is important, and offers a range of insights for imagining adifferent future for both fields. (Bhrigupati Singh, a workshop participant,has recently offered a set of compelling questions for enacting such a future: http://www.medanthrotheory.org/read/8083/uncritical-encounter-anthropology-psychiatry). Nevertheless,when one looks to anthropological interest in psychiatry in the Middle East, theliterature is, unfortunately, uneven. From where I sit, the most sustained anthropologicalattention to mental health issues in the Middle East have been in the name oftrauma and PTSD. There is a sizable body of research here—much of it not anthropological—examiningthe politics of trauma and, relatedly, therapeutic and humanitarian efforts toaddress the psychological effects of political violence. On the one hand, thiswork has been important in pushing research away from simplistic, essentializedmodels of “culture” and “mental illness”. On the other hand, unfortunately, thisattention to trauma and PTSD perpetuates the geopolitical narrative of theMiddle East as a setting of unrelenting violence and conflict. There are signs,however, that things are shifting. A recent issue of the journal Middle East–Topics &#38; Arguments (https://meta-journal.net/) and a specialsection of Medical Anthropology Theory(http://www.medanthrotheory.org/issue/vol-2-3/) wereboth devoted to thinking “beyond trauma” in the Middle East. I would add, though, that this trend—the way that trauma and its  treatment has overshadowed other topics—has also contributed, in complex ways, to a decreased interest in (and funding for the treatment  of) other forms of psychological or emotional distress in the region. As I see it, this points toward an everyday terrain of psychiatric care,  psychopharmaceutical use, and subjective experience that needs to be  more expansively examined. In Turkey, for instance, one sees curious trends in psychiatry when looking beyond the field of trauma-focused psychosocial interventions (which are, not surprisingly, widespread in refugee camps and displaced Syrian communities in Turkey). What one finds, as the historian Fatih Artvınlı has observed, is a rapid expansion of “community-based” approaches to mental health care happening alongside—literally at the same time as—the building of new,  large psychiatric hospitals in the provinces. What to make of these seemingly opposed trends—this simultaneous de- and re-institutionalization of psychiatry? While it can perhaps be read as a telling symptom of the current political situation in Turkey—with its brutal and dispiriting convergence of neoliberal policy and authoritarian politics—this dynamic nonetheless raises a range of  important research questions for anthropologists and historians interested in psychiatry in the region. Thelast thing I’ll add here is that, along a very different line, there has been arecent surge of interest—among anthropologists and historians—in psychoanalysisand psychoanalytic theory in the region. I’m thinking specifically of Omnia ElShakry’s The Arabic Freud (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2017) and Stefania Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul (University of California Press, 2018). Althoughpsychoanalysis continues to be an under-utilized therapeutic approach, it hasnonetheless given rise to an exceptionally rich set of questions andconfrontations in the region. Perhaps unexpectedly, this has also been a placewhere religion has entered into scholarly conversations about psychiatry ininteresting ways. This is most certainly a relationship—between psychiatry andreligion—that is in desperate need of further attention. What are theintellectual and political stakes of studying the history and contemporaryscientific and medical discourses around healing in Turkey?&#160;I’mgoing to offer an answer here that is somewhat askew of the question. In myresearch, I have been fascinated with the political life of psychiatricinterventions that emerged out of a context of large-scale disaster. Theearthquake in Turkey would prove to be an important moment for the developmentof new models of psychiatric and psychological care. Indeed, a lot of what wesee happening in Turkey today—especially in the way that psychologicaldiscourses have become increasingly important for the management of social andpolitical lives far beyond clinical settings—can be traced back to theearthquake. And here, there are a range of intriguing intellectual andpolitical stakes converging around these psychiatric technologies. There is of course a history to this convergence. Looking to the past, for instance, there were very few mental health professionals in Turkey prepared, clinically speaking, to treat the sort of emotional suffering that the earthquake precipitated. Those most prepared turned out to be a group of relatively marginal (in relation to mainstream psychiatry) mental health professionals, namely a group of leftist psychiatrists who had conducted research on the traumatic effects of police torture and a group of feminist psychologists who had worked with survivors of gender-based violence. In my work, I have been fascinated with how these political stakes of psychiatry transformed as they passed through the earthquake. In turn, the psychiatric response to the earthquake would have a series of surprising political afterlives—as the instruments and techniques developed in the earthquake traveled to eastern Turkey following another earthquake to mediate conditions profoundly disordered by both the earthquake and a history Kurdish dispossession and Turkish state violence. And a few years later, these same instruments would be used by psychiatrists taking part in the Gezi Park uprising to document the psychological effects of police violence, and from there they would move into the refugee camps along Turkey’s Syrian border. My point here is that the intellectual stakes of studying psychiatry in Turkey has brought into view a range of political stakes that weren’t imaginable at the outset of this project. As such, there’s much to be learned about the contemporary moment in Turkey by tracing the histories and lived realities of these sorts of therapeutic encounters. In certain regards, this can be read as a different articulation of the central argument of my first book—that healing and politics are overlapping projects of world and subject making. This, in turn, brings to mind yet further questions about the political stakes of this sort of research—or, for that matter, any research being done in Turkey right now. Given the unprecedented repression of academics in Turkey over the past several years—with our colleagues and friends being fired from their positions, arrested, and imprisoned—what does it mean to do this sort of research today, and, perhaps more importantly, how will the political stakes of the present deform the intellectual stakes of future generations of scholars? Christopher Dole is Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College whose research and writing explores the intersection of suffering, healing, and politics. His publications include Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), The Time of Catastrophe (co-editor, Routledge, 2015), and articles that have appeared in the American Anthropologist; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Ethos; and International Migration and Human Rights. He is currently working on a project concerned with humanitarian  psychiatry and the affective remains of catastrophe in Turkey.&#160; 