KNOT OF THE SOUL - STEFANIA PANDOLFO

I’ve had this one on the to-read pile for a while. I’m not sure where I first heard of it but I’m glad I finally got around to it. This is very much my shit. Pandolfo is an anthropologist and thinker who embedded herself with a Moroccan psych hospital as well as a milieu of traditional Moroccan healers and faith leaders who all tackle questions of mental health from a non-European and Islamic point of view. If, like me, you’re interested in, but deeply skeptical of, psychology and psychiatry, this a wonderful jumping off point for thinking about these issues. Psychology and psychiatry (especially the latter) make pretty bold and universal claims about the nature of the mind and mental health which are obviously overstated and untrue. Culture and communal notions of health and wellness are vitally important to how we treat and think about things like schizophrenia or depression. Pandolfo gets deep in it, she manages to speak to French trained Moroccan doctors who are quite fluent in Western notions of mental health and sits in with them as they treat people from across the Moroccan countryside. She also travels into these countrysides and speaks with traditional faith healers who treat mental illness by reciting the Koran, view most mental illnesses as jinn-caused and have an entirely different but consistent worldview that calls for completely different treatments. Interestingly, these two groups do seem to have a deep understanding and appreciation for one another, often patients travel between the two for relief from their suffering and neither seems to view the other as “wrong” but merely working from a different set of assumptions and using a different set of tools. There is less of the arrogance I associate with Western mental health professionals. Most usefully, the traditional healers are very insistent that these mental health challenges are deeper than the suffering individual, that they involve the community and the material conditions of the afflicted and have a spiritual component that can’t be reduced to taking the right medications. She gets very deep into traditional Islamic notions of the soul and what it means to be a balanced and healthy person. Like when reading about Indian faith traditions, the technical jargon in non-English languages (here, in Arabic) can be tricky to parse and keep straight, she includes a lot of Arabic, which I don’t speak, and I spent the whole time feeling a depth that I’m unable to plumb. But it’s a masterful book, unlike a lot of anthropology, I do get the sense that she actually really deeply understands these worlds and can converse with her subjects on a very deep level. It’s always a relief and a breath of fresh air to get outside of the Western paradigm that insists that it is all and there is nothing outside of it besides barbarism and ignorance and to see that not only do different traditions have different ideas about things like the mind, they have deeper and more interesting things to say.