Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai<br />
into the essentialist, self-victimizing and differentialist narratives, consistent<br />
with a social and cultural world created by antagonizing “sames”<br />
against “others”, without trying to challenge those very narratives at the<br />
same time? How far should we reconstruct for them a meaningful and<br />
ontologically secure world by these existing cultural resources, if the latter<br />
were structured around binary oppositions that produced ethnic hatred and<br />
war, and that undermined not only the possibility of multiethnic coexistence,<br />
but the very process of the introduction of democracy in all of the<br />
Balkan region?<br />
I think these questions are crucial in a project of psychosocial intervention.<br />
Perhaps we should not limit ourselves to collecting existing narratives of<br />
illness and healing, in order to reintegrate people within locally existing<br />
definitions of personhood and configurations of society, thus avoiding the<br />
risk of Western ethnocentric pathologization and psychologization. This<br />
methodology and approach is, of course, fundamental, but not sufficient,<br />
as its implicit cultural relativism carries within it a philological and conservationist<br />
approach to societies and cultures. These should not be seen as<br />
something local and separate, as something to respect and preserve in a<br />
vacuum, but rather as the outcome of a network of contradictory dynamics<br />
adjusting themselves continually to new perceived and experienced threats<br />
and needs. Local societies, however, are now increasingly becoming<br />
places of interaction and experience of both multi-local and global dynamics.<br />
Acknowledging this would also mean facing and dealing with the<br />
political and social consequences of psycho-social intervention. In this<br />
perspective, what was and still is really at stake in contemporary<br />
Yugoslavia is the process of democratization. This process cannot occur<br />
without the introduction of a cognitive and libidinal framework that<br />
acknowledges difference as a founding element of the natural order, rather<br />
than as a threat and anomaly.<br />
Of particular importance to our common effort is the fact that since the<br />
homogeneous and the heterogeneous opposing cognitive worlds are also<br />
moral worlds, they will necessarily produce their own opposing definitions<br />
of justice, each of which will be tied to a definition of acceptable individual<br />
and social behaviour. It is because of these opposing definitions of<br />
political and social justice, that conflicts and “traumatic” events take place,<br />
and it is usually in the language of political and social justice, that a solution<br />
to suffering and trauma is sought and articulated by the actors of the<br />
narrated events: the refugees.<br />
In my last visits to rump Serbia and Kosovo, I was bewildered by the fact<br />
that in both settings, people usually seek therapeutic help and are treated<br />
within their ethnic groups. At times, refugees even sought help from other<br />
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