Dr Claudia Lang (C.V.)

Claudia's research focuses on mental health, digitization, ecological distress, global health, planetary health, and traditional medicine, primarily in South Asia (particularly India), and drawing upon comparative ethnographic and transnational perspectives. Her research is at the intersection of mental health and social life, situating the lived experience and care of mental distress in wider social relations.

Environ-mental health 

This research investigates “environ-mental health” in India, using the lens of ecological grief. Expanding mental ill health beyond individual pathology, this project situates suffering at the intersection of ecological, individual, and collective wounding. Grief has become a shared feeling of what it means to inhabit contemporary worlds in an age of planetary unraveling.  Treating the Anthropocene fundamentally as a time of mourning, and drawing on novel conceptual and methodological tools in anthropology this project traces the experience, ethics, and politics of ecological grief amid wounded environments and probes grief’s generative potential for practices of repair. Theoretically, this research focuses on the affective responses to experienced or anticipated environmental damage and loss. Its aim is to trace grief’s generative and world-building potential, to delve into modalities of repairing distressed minds and ecologies, and probe grief’s generative potential (poiesis) for practices of repair. 

Mental health chatbots and platforms

This research focuses on digital mental health innovations in India. It explores automated therapy (therapy that works with a chatbot as therapist) and “platformization” (for profit platforms that connect therapists with clients across India). Mental health apps and platforms provide innovative technologies and techniques for self-work, diagnosis, and management of everyday mental health crises. They not only respond to new mental health needs. They also profoundly reshape what it means to be mentally healthy and distressed, how to care for it, and how therapeutic encounters are experienced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with designers and users of digital mental health care in India, the research explores the political, economic, and moral aspirations and worries associated with such digital tools; and the new forms of care, self-care, and intimacy they produce. 

Depression and public health

This research focuses on the emergence of depression as a public health priority and its impact in South India. In Kerala, depression has become a political concern: the state’s investment into a less-depressed future. By becoming a political concern, depression reshapes what it means to be well, to suffer, to be a citizen, and to intervene and manage people and populations. As an object to be governed through care and surveillance, depression reshapes not only the tasks, skills, and priorities of health workers. It also affects how people think about and intervene in emotional suffering. This technical rendering of mental health as depression management aims to shift the gaze of health workers and to reconfigure distress according to a globally standardized symptom catalogue for depression. However, screening technologies and techniques, which aim to know, universalize, and transform subjective experience often fail to do so. Instead, health workers mobilize global mental health technologies alongside local and situated biologies and moralities.

Mental health and Ayurvedic psychiatry

This research focuses on the practice of Ayurvedic psychiatry in Kerala, India, in the face of a purported epidemic of depression in India the growing hegemony of biomedicine. It examines the conceptual and ontological movement of depression, while at the same time attending to the ways depression is integrated into and shaped by various global and local webs of meaning and practice. Using a Latourian approach, I consider translationsof Ayurvedic concepts to allopathic/biomedical terms allow Ayurveda to claim scientific validity and a role in public mental healthcare while maintaining a view of Ayurveda as ultimately distinct from biomedicine. My book Depression in Kerala. Ayurveda and mental health care in 21st century India is published by Routledge. 

Intersexed bodies

Research on intersexed bodies focused on the ways people living with and in an intersexed body. At the intersection of the anthropology of body, health, and gender, I looked into the ways intersexed bodies are understood and intervened upon, and how they are lived and politically struggled for. I explored, how historical and cultural assumptions shaped scientific knowledge production of bodies between the two sexes, and how medical knowledge and queer activism have shaped how individuals inhabit an intersexed body. My book, Intersexualität. Leben zwischen den zwei Geschlechtern is published by Campus. 

Books

2024 (edited with Dominik Mattes, Janina Kehr, Julia Koroknai, Friederike Rosenbaum, Helmar Kurz, Caroline Meier zu Biesen, Ehler Voss). Cache 04: Radical Health. Zürich: Intercomverlag, https://cache.ch/radicalhealth. 

2022 (edited with Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Andrew McDowell and Claire Beaudevin). Global Health for All. Knowledge, Politics, and Practices. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/global-health-for-all/9781978827400/

2021 (edited with William Sax). The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical views from South and Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463721622/the-movement-for-global-mental-health

2018. Depression in Kerala: Ayurveda and Mental Health Care in 21st Century India, London and New York: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Depression-in-Kerala-Ayurveda-and-Mental-Health-Care-in-21st-Century-India/Lang/p/book/9780367589585?srsltid=AfmBOorvAGOXu-z53FxndjqPNwhGyVKOr998hIH41qzJG30n3tmnH9NE

2017 (edited with Philipp Zehmisch; Ursula Münster; Jens Zickgraf) Soziale Ästhetik, Atmosphäre, Medialität. Beiträge aus der Ethnologie. Frankfurt a. Main: LIT. https://lit-verlag.de/isbn/978-3-643-13911-5/

2006. Intersexualität: Menschen zwischen den Geschlechtern. Frankfurt/Main: Campus.https://www.campus.de/buecher-campus-verlag/wissenschaft/kulturwissenschaften/intersexualitaet-2838.html?srsltid=AfmBOooTgNF1ODkr2w3ZhY1pXE9hOfiXPcsb03TJmOySVd9O5aiCp3FR

Articles

2024 .“Psy technologists and the reconfiguration of expertise in digital mental health: Two case studies from India”. Special Issue “Health-Related Expertise in the Digital Age”, MAT Medical Anthropology Theory, 12(1): 1-24. https://www.medanthrotheory.org/mat/article/view/9060

2024  (with Caroline Meier zu Biesen and Marian Burchardt) “Introduction: Digital Technologies and the Future of Health: Aspirations, Care and Data”, Special Issue “Digital Technologies and the Future of Health: Aspirations, Care and Data”, Anthropology & Medicine 31(3). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13648470.2024.2397921#abstract

2024 .“Dreaming big with little therapy devices: Automated therapy from India”. Special Issue “Digital Technologies and the Future of Health: Aspirations, Care and Data”, Anthropology & Medicine 31(1).https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13648470.2024.2378727

2024 (with Hynek Bečka, Samiksha Bhan, Desirée Kumpf, Hanna Nieber, Julia Vorhölter, Hanna Werner). “Introduction: Universality in Pieces? Mobilizations of Science in a Fractured World”, Special Issue “Universality in Pieces? Mobilizations of Science in a Fractured World”, Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 149(1): 1-12. https://zfejsca.org/ojs/index.php/jsca/article/view/1874

2024 (with Sonali Sathaye). “From context-free to aggregate universality: life skills courses and the making of automated therapy in Bengaluru, India,” Special Issue “Universality in Pieces? Mobilizations of Science in a Fractured World”, Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 149(1): 13-32. https://zfejsca.org/ojs/index.php/jsca/article/view/1875

2023 (with Murphy Halliburton). “Curiosity and Creative Experimentation among Psychiatrists in India”, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 48(2): 310-328. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37713142/

2023. Book review: Science and Religion in India. Beyond Disenchantment, by Renny Thomas. Technology and Culture, 64(3):976-978. 

2021 (with Dominik Mattes). “Embodied Belonging: In/exclusion, Health Care, and Well-Being in a World in Motion”, Introduction, Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 45: 2-21. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-020-09693-3

2020 .“Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, Market and Homoeopathy, by Shinjini Das. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. 

2019 (with Anne Lovell and Ursula Read). “Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health”, Special Issue “ “Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health”, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 43(4): 519-547.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-019-09660-7

2019 . “Inspecting Mental Health. Depression, surveillance and care in Kerala, South India”, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 43(4): 596-612. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-019-09656-3

2018. “Translation and Purification: Ayurvedic Psychiatry, Allopathic Psychiatry, Spirits and Occult Violence in Kerala, South India”, Anthropology & Medicine 25(2): 141-161. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13648470.2017.1285001#abstract

2017. “Neurochemistry and subjunctivities of depression in Kerala, South India”. Anthropology & Medicine 1-15. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13648470.2019.1651585?needAccess=true#abstract

2014. „Trick or Treat? Muslim Thangals, psychologisation and pragmatic realism in Northern Kerala, India“, Transcultural Psychiatry 51(6):904-923. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1363461514525221?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed

2013 (with Eva Jansen), „The Ayurvedic Appropriation of Depression: Biomedicalizing Ayurvedic Psychiatry”, Medical Anthropology 32(1):25-45.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01459740.2012.674584

2012 (with Eva Jansen), “Transforming the Self and Healing the Body through the Use of Testimonies in a Divine Retreat Centre, Kerala” (with Eva Jansen), Journal of Religion and Health 51 (2): 542-551.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10943-011-9564-7