Shrinking the Planet

• Roy, Meghna (2026). Trouble in Paradise: ‘Capacity to Aspire’ among Northeast Indian Migrants in Bengaluru's Wellness Industry. Anthropology in Action. ISSN 0967-201X. 32(1), p. 38–43. doi: 10.3167/aia.2025.320106. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Using themes and narratives from The White Lotus , this article ethnographically examines the positioning of migrants from Northeast India within the labour hierarchies of Bengaluru's wellness industry. It explores two trajectories: middle-class counsellors whose therapeutic expertise constitutes emotional labour, and working-class service providers – hairdressers and masseuses – whose labour combines touch and scripted care. Northeastern migrants are sought after for their perceived docility, English fluency and ‘Asian’ appearance, yet racialised biases limit their access to higher-status wellness professions requiring academic credentials. While pathways for self-making exist, the industry's promises of self-work and professional advancement remain unequally distributed. This analysis highlights how race, region and class shape the ‘capacity to aspire’ in urban contexts, positioning the wellness industry as a significant site for aspirational self-making.

• Martin, Keir James Cecil (2025). An Anthropology of Psychology in the Twenty-First Century. In Bruun, Mikkel Kenni & Hutten, Rebecca (Ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Psychology. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781836951568. doi: 10.1515/9781836951582-010. Full text in Research Archive
• Roy, Meghna (2025). Does India need saving from psychotherapy? Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 41(5), p. 7–10. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.70028. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  That psychotherapy is colonial is a prevailing stance within and beyond psychology in India. Such a position risks aligning with essentialist binaries like ‘East/West’ espoused by Hindu nationalism. Although its practice began in the Indian subcontinent during the late colonial period, examining the history of psychotherapy suggests that it was more than merely a ‘Western’ import. Ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews at a psychotherapy training programme in Bengaluru show that the contemporary practice of psychotherapy in India similarly resists such accusations of colonization. New entrants into India's urban middle classes are enthusiastically opting for therapy. Reading their participation as a continuation of colonization would deny them agency and potentially erase their capacity to define what decolonizing means to them. Furthermore, erstwhile colonies may be internally varied through differentials of power, thus making ‘coloniality’ a condition that cannot be easily divided into clear divisions between the Global South and the Global North.

• Krause, Inga-Britt (2025). Grace and correspondence in ethnography and psychotherapy. Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. ISSN 0091-2131. doi: 10.1111/etho.70003. Full text in Research Archive
• Martin, Keir James Cecil (2024). Culture and class in contemporary Chinese psychotherapy. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 40(3), p. 7–9. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12891. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Working with US-based psychoanalysts who instruct Chinese psychoanalytic trainees, some reject any discussion of ‘culture’ as a means by which patients avoid difficult material, whilst others draw a sharp contrast between ‘the Chinese mind’ and ‘the Western mind’. My discussion with Chinese psychoanalytic trainees suggests that although they often use a ‘China/West’ dichotomy to understand clinical work, they are more likely than their predominantly Euro-American analytic trainers to look at this distinction in fluid terms affected by other differences. They often draw attention to the ‘type’ of person who is the typical client of psychoanalytic therapy in contemporary China: young, urban, cosmopolitan and financially solvent. This article investigates how Chinese psychoanalytic trainees’ perceptions of relevant differences in their practice vary depending on the conversational context, challenging both the universalist claims of traditional psychoanalytic theory and the recent emphasis on cultural differences in the field.

• Khitrov, Arsenii (2024). Therapy in turmoil: Russian psychotherapists navigate war and ethics. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 40(5), p. 19–23. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12915. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This ethnographic study explores how Russian psychotherapists are navigating professional ethics and politics after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Analysing a conversation between an instructor and students at a psychotherapy training centre in Russia, the study examines how therapists negotiate neutrality, values and therapeutic approaches in a shifting sociopolitical landscape. The author identifies four approaches to delineating the boundaries between professional practice and political engagement and explores how the boundaries between therapeutic and political realms are constantly negotiated through social interaction. These processes highlight tensions within Russian therapeutic culture and offer insights into professional subjectivity formation amid political turmoil, revealing the complex interplay between individual subjectivity, professional identity and sociopolitical structures in contemporary societies. The research contributes to anthropological understandings of professional communities as mediators between individuals and states. The study also shows how cultural norms adapt to political pressures and illuminates the role of therapeutic practices in shaping societal responses to political events in authoritarian settings.

• Dowdy, Sean (2022). The Bronze Sandal, or a Defense of Cosmic Refusal. Political Theology. ISSN 1462-317X. doi: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2095857. Full text in Research Archive
• Dowdy, Sean (2022). In the name of the father? Northeast India and problems of national kinship. Contemporary South Asia. ISSN 0958-4935. 30(2), p. 291–294. doi: 10.1080/09584935.2022.2060341. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah’s book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.

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• Roy, Meghna (2026). Benson, Peter. Stuck moving: or, how I learned to love (and lament) anthropology. xvi, 380 pp., bibliogr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. £25.00 (paper). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. ISSN 1359-0987. doi: 10.1111/1467-9655.70170. Full text in Research Archive
• Roy, Meghna (2025). Making futures legible: how counselling trainees mobilize the figure of the doctor in India. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper asks: how do trainee counsellors in India craft their future professional identities amid uncertain infrastructures of care? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a postgraduate counselling psychology programme in a private university run by an indigenous congregation in Bengaluru, I consider training as a speculative, futures-making practice. In the absence of state regulation, trainees mobilize the culturally authoritative figure of the doctor to render their occupation socially legible. Many had once aspired to become doctors and now position themselves in relation to biomedicine to claim legitimacy and articulate their work to family and peers. Through a person-centred ethnography of one trainee, I examine how therapeutic sensibilities are cultivated alongside aspirations, anxieties, and moral imaginaries shaped by India's privatized healthcare landscape. Trainees fear their profession may follow the medical path toward exclusionary, commodified care, even as they invoke its authority. By reframing treatment difference as a treatment gap, they promote awareness and help produce an emergent ontology of mental health. I argue that the ambiguity of their professional status opens a space for ethical world-making—where counselling is not yet fixed, and its meanings are shaped by those training to embody it.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Blending Art and Science - American Ethnological Society. doi: https:/americanethnologist.org/online-content/blending-art-and-science-by-meghna-roy/. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The essay reflects on ethnographic fieldwork in a counseling psychology program in Bengaluru, where the author participates in professional development exercises and therapy simulations while studying trainee counselors. As she shares her own history of depression and family life, the boundary between researcher and participant blurs, making vulnerability mutual rather than one-sided. Through classroom reflections, role-plays, and group discussions on PhD mental health, fieldwork becomes a space of intervention that reshapes the author’s sense of self as much as it generates data. The piece argues that ethnography, like psychotherapy, “blends art and science” by demanding emotional exposure, relational care, and a willingness for the researcher to be transformed by the field.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Mind the Culture, episode 1: What do you mean Psychological Anthropology? – European Network for Psychological Anthropology. doi: https:/open.spotify.com/episode/799Y0V3Zl4exIXG8U9FoKn?si=JScY_NxhSXSTC9PDwj_NfQ. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this episode, Meghna Roy (University of Oslo) is in conversation with Mayssa Rekhis (University of Gothenburg; programme director at the time of recording) and Thomas Stodulka (University of Münster) to explore the significance of psychological anthropology as a critical public endeavour. The guests discuss their personal journeys with the subject, the formation of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology, and the ethical implications of fieldwork.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). Child is the mother of woman: The Making of the Self at a Counselling Training Programme in India. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this presentation, I ask how the self of the trainee is shaped by psychological counselling as a technology of the self. The average trainee is a privileged caste middle-class woman in early twenties. Hence, the common discourse in India is that psychotherapy makes a person self-indulgent leading to disintegration of the family. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork at a postgraduate programme in Counselling Psychology in southern India, I observe that the trainee views her identity as an extension of or in opposition to her family members. During self-work, or inner work mandated in training, the individual trainee often seeks to transform her self in relation to her family. Amid widespread stigma associated with psychological taxonomies of mental illness in South Asia, trainees use counselling practice “to break the pattern.” Pattern refers to the layered subjugation of gender, caste, class, religious and ethnolinguistic minorities as well as patterns of the self that do not serve her anymore. Trainees attempt to repair what they perceive as fractured personhood of significant others in family by means of self-reflection. In self-work, trainees may at once assume identities of their grandmothers, mothers and themselves. Enmeshment with family members as a source of their suffering and identity thus reveals family life as integral to becoming a counsellor.

• Roy, Meghna (2025). The making of moral futures among psychotherapeutic trainees in India. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper considers how psychotherapeutic trainees discern everyday morality. I ask: What does making morality in anticipation of future practice reveal about an emergent subjectivity informed by psychotherapy? I draw from ethnographic fieldwork at a psychotherapeutic training program in a privately funded university managed by a Christian Trust in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), the capital of Karnataka in southern India. Most of the trainees in this programme moved to Bengaluru in their twenties to undergo training that culminates in a master’s degree in counselling psychology. Through mandatory ‘self-work’ trainees mobilize the science of psychology to make and unmake the contours of private morality as they prepare for professional practice in India where psychotherapy is not yet regulated by the state. While ethical codes of practice developed in the United States are available to trainees, trainees produce viable moral standards of practice in India in the absence of a regulatory body. Trainees adapt seemingly universal scientific values to the local context of private psychotherapy practice in urban India. Existing caste, ethnolinguistic and religious diversity within the classroom is perceived as an advantage to be leveraged upon. On the other hand, diversity is perceived as a challenge to be overcome in future ‘multicultural’ practice. This paper is about how trainees negotiate their private morals in the shape of an imagined future.

• Khitrov, Arsenii (2024). The Private Hope for Public Healing: The Role of Psychotherapy in Envisioning a New Society. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2024). Breaking the Cycle of Violence: How Psychotherapists Envision Social Transformation in Russia. Full text in Research Archive
• Martin, Keir James Cecil (2024). Culture and Class in contemporary Chinese psychotherapy. Full text in Research Archive
• Martin, Keir James Cecil; Khitrov, Arsenii; Rekhis, Mayssa & Gronseth, Anne-Sigfrid (2024). Undoing and redoing the Social in Psychotherapy. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2024). Visions of Healing: Unveiling Russian Psychotherapists’ Idea of Psychotherapy's Mission. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2024). Beyond the Self: Private Psychotherapists Thinking about Collective Change in Russia. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2024). From Violence to Therapy: The Symbolic Boundary Work of Psychotherapists in Russia and Their Vision of Social Change. Full text in Research Archive
• Martin, Keir James Cecil (2024). The formation of culture in contemporary Chinese psychotherapy. Full text in Research Archive
• Martin, Keir James Cecil (2023). Culture and Class in Contemporary Chinese Psychotherapy. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2023). Psychotherapeutic politics and political psychotherapy in contemporary Russia. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2023). Psychotherapeutic politics and political psychotherapy in contemporary Russia. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2023). Psychotherapy and class: communities of self-re-creation. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2023). Therapeutic self-care and imagining social space. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2023). Psychotherapeutic politics and political psychotherapy in contemporary Russia. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2022). Psychotherapy in Russia today: investment and cycle-breaking. Full text in Research Archive
• Khitrov, Arsenii (2022). Therapeutic theory as an explanans and an explanandum in the learning environment in Russia. Full text in Research Archive
• Martin, Keir James Cecil (2022). 'Keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interconnected' in contemporary China: psychotherapy clients' and trainees experiences of self-boundary making. Full text in Research Archive

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