Recent work in global mental health has shown that commonly accepted practices, like psychotherapy and 'debriefing' are not always relevent across cultures. In the context of political violence and resettlement, Tibetan refugees tend not to draw upon religious practices and cultural understandings of emptiness and compassion to mitigate distress. Sara Lewis will discuss how Tibetans deploy shared cultural sensibilities to reframe the traumas they have experienced and promote healthy coping. Using Bodhichitta practice, difficulty in life become an opportunity to “wake up”—-that is, to generate compassion and a view of emptiness. This challenges the notion that trauma is a universal and inevitable outcome of political violence, and instead shows how social and religious practices work to empower communities in transforming adversity.
Sara Lewis is a PhD candidate in medical anthropology. Her research interests lie at the intersections of mental health, culture and religion. Her dissertation research, funded by a Fulbright-Nehru award, the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and a Lemelson Society for Psychological Anthropology Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, involved 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dharamsala, India, investigating how Buddhism and other sociocultural factors support coping and resilience among Tibetan refugees (dissertation sponsor is Prof Kim Hopper). She has also served as a co-investigator on several research projects related to mental health and recovery with the Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts, an NIMH-funded center at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, and with the California Mental Health Services Authority. Her work has been published in Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry; Ethos; Psychiatric Services; and Anthropology of Consciousness. In addition to her research activities, she works as a psychotherapist in community mental health, focusing on the treatment of serious and persistent mental illness.
Annabella Pitkin, Term Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard, received her B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard (1990), and Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia (2009). Her interests include practices of history, biography, memory and social change in the Himalayan region and East Asia; interactions between Buddhism and modernity; and transregional dynamics linking the Himalayan region to other parts of Asia. She is currently working on a book titled ““Memory, Affiliation and Hope: Transnational Narratives and Traveling Teachers - the Asian Uses of the Tibetan Buddhist Past”. Publications include "Lineage, Authority and Innovation: The Biography of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen," in Mapping the Modern in Tibet. International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, Vol. 12, 2012; "Cosmopolitanism in the Himalayas: The Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of Khu nu bla ma bsTan 'dzin rgyal mtshan and his Sikkimese Teacher Khang gsar ba bla ma O rgyan bstan 'dzin rin po che,” in Namgyal Institute of Tibetology Bulletin 40, No.2, 2004; “Scandalous Ethics: Levinas and Nagarjuna,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, No. 5-7, 2001.