The idea that emotions are socially constructed challenges traditional views in both family therapy and anthropology and also opens the possibility for further collaboration. This paper reviews the traditional position of orthodox family therapy theory with respect to motivation and emotions. I t argues that a social constructionist position can build on original family therapy insights about the connectedness of family members and offer a view which transcends mind-body dualism. Bateson's concept of ethos is seen as a forerunner of this view and, with the increasing interest in meaning and cross-cultural issues, Bateson's ideas deserve renewed attention. Implications of a social constructionist view of emotions for family therapists are outlined.
This paper argues that ideas about personhood and relationships vary cross-culturally and that although it is not always obvious or easy to discover, this variation is particularly salient to family therapy. This argument is supported by a dual definition of culture emphasizing both continuity of cultural themes (generative aspect) and the reconstitution, redefinition and change of such themes through interaction and communication (interactive aspect). The effectiveness of interventions which are isomorphic with ideas which families themselves hold about personhood is demonstrated through work with two families, one Punjabi and one Bangladeshi.
To social anthropologists an affinity with psychotherapy lies in the view that this discipline is a social science. Increasingly, social anthropologists offer comments and analyse their own data using psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic frames of reference. At the same time, a methodological crisis has developed in ethnography. This is a crisis of how to carry out an ethnographic enquiry in a disciplined manner without either claiming to be a detached observer on the one hand or explaining away the subjective experiences of informants or clients with too much interpretation on the other. The aim of this paper is to address this crisis and to suggest ways in which ethnographers can use techniques from one type of psychotherapy, namely systemic or family psychotherapy in order to access social and psychological aspects of the lives of their informants. The paper achieves this by describing systemic psychotherapy and its theoretical foundations in the ethnographic work of Gregory Bateson. It then reviews the mainly medical anthropology literature in which the connection between psychotherapy and anthro pology has been discussed. While this literature has suggested a narrative and a performative approach to ethnographic data and, therefore, to informants, it has not extended the analytic frame to include the ethnographer him/herself within these frames. Clinical case material is presented to demonstrate how such an inclusion is central to the practice of systemic psychotherapy and to show that this type of material is ethnographic. The techniques of double description, hypothesising and circular questioning are described and demonstrated, and it is argued that adapting these to an ethnographic enquiry will enhance the validity of the anthropological project.
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