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Pouring out Postsocialist Fears: Practical Metaphysics of a Therapy at a Distance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2012

Larisa Jasarevic
Larisa Jasarevic*
Affiliation:
International Studies Program, University of Chicago
*
jasarevic@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

This paper examines the healing practice of strava, which translates as “great fear.” With a long oral history in Bosnia, it has become particularly popular since the end of socialism and the 1990s war. This postsocialist therapy, informed by gifting dispositions, is a bustling business that intervenes into disorders that people commonly relate to the new economy. Strava treatment presupposes distance, since the therapist rarely touches the bodies at hand, and concerned intimates commonly arranged interventions in a patient's absence. Inspired by Bruno Latour's advice to expand our notion of agency in directions indicated by those we study, I depart from the earlier accounts of strava as a traditional and symbolic folk practice. Instead, I explore its claims to efficacy in competition with psycho-pharmaceutical treatments of anxiety and depression in contemporary Bosnia. Of particular interest is a commonplace therapeutic blunder—the accidental mixing of “fears” water and Coke, which therapists shrug off as inconsequential. This points to a model of action best explored outside the pragmatics of science studies, employing insights gained from a rereading of Mauss', Tylor's, and Frazer's classic theories of sympathetic magic. I examine what makes strava water—carefully prepared with prayers and handled by the therapist's and patient's wishing breaths—ritually potent, while Coke remains ineffectual. I show that this therapy is the domain of wishing, which does not interrupt a sphere of new political economy, but nevertheless intervenes in the bodies that suffer from it, and effectively redraws the limits of the social.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 914 - 941
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012

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