WELCOME

A website is a crossroads, a platform. All through these years, I have always wished I could inform, share and open doors for patients, colleagues, younger people interested in these fields or just curious to meet someone who likes to move around crossroads. I have always found it stimulating to navigate between health, culture and performance.

Body is my main tool and laboratory, to study links and contrasts between these working areas. This is what medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry aim at in both research and clinical applications.
Body, from religious rituals to experimental theater, exploring traditions and techniques of body learning, how useful this is when dealing with identity and communities, with health, illness and care.
Body in cultural and art performance and how the learning, training, practice and transmission can help coping with illness and other conditions where one is challenged by change and forced into adaptation. This particular work-in-progress has evolved into The masters of their conditions.

The first part of this research, and its applications, focuses on body learning in intercultural practices such as martial arts, dance forms, and other aspects of performance. Codified methods of learning have enabled cultural groups to keep their traditions alive, in spite of changes and migrations.
The second part deals with narration as a multimedia performance. Both patients and healers can use information and techniques from the arts across cultures to reconstruct case histories; we can help patients build their own therapeutic systems and strategies, with the guidance of healers.
The third part – still in preparation – is about the differences of body learning between East and West. The Eastern learning methods produce living treasures whose aging is valued; the Western unlearning methods produce the aberrations of cosmetic culture whose aging is denied.

At this point of my life, my best bet is to make information and network available to younger professionals and anyone interested. Hard work and academic approaches represent one side of the idea. I also need to be critical, caustic and provocative in order to keep freedom alive and to make it an asset for patients and for us, health professionals, multimedia artists and citizens. While fighting against reductionism and various forms of –centrisms, we may remain curious about new approaches and technologies, since all forms of globalization are not necessarily negative. So, this website offers informative entries and there is room for exchange and communication:

Medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry cover the health and culture bridge; theatre anthropology and performance covers the culture and performance bridge. The performance and health bridge is of course always a work-in-progress. I selected two fieldwork areas where I have worked and still work actively: Salvador and Bahia, Brasil, New Orleans and Louisiana, USA. Other familiar areas such as India and Japan you will find in the theatre entry.
The interactive entries are the e-mail page and this blog page where I shall regularly be writing.