Project Details
Projekt
Environ-mental health: Experience, ethics and poiesis of ecological grief amid wounded environments in Kerala, India
Applicant
Privatdozentin Dr. Claudia Lang
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550224200
This project investigates “environ-mental health” in Kerala, South India, using the lens of ecological grief. Expanding mental ill health beyond individual pathology, this project situates suffering at the intersection of ecological, individual, and collective wounding. Treating the Anthropocene fundamentally as a time of mourning (Kelz & Knappe, 2021), this project traces the experience, ethics, and politics of ecological grief amid wounded environments and probes grief’s generative potential for practices of repair. Here, “ecological grief” is understood as the affective response to experienced or anticipated environmental damage and loss. It can be seen as something that requires repair but also a form of repair in itself. Reparative action emerging out of ecological grief becomes a method of environ-mental repair, even as mental pathologies situated in wounded environments are being repaired in clinical contexts that also link psychological to environmental suffering. The objectives of the project are (a) to understand ecological grief as it is experienced, articulated and mobilized in the context of environmental damage, loss, and climate change in Kerala; (b) to describe how ecological grief becomes both generative of, as well as needing repair in the context of the everyday, the clinic, and environmental activism; and (c) to test the concept of environ-mental health. As response to conditions and impetus for action, both collective and intensely personal experiences of grief are often attached to particular places. This project focuses, first, on knowing, experiencing and sensing environmental damage and loss. Second, it focuses on the poiesis or the generative and transformative work of ecological grief for environmental, social, and individual repair. Working in Cochin, Kerala, the research follows ecological grief and repair into a constellation of three intersecting areas of engagement: (1) the everyday, (2) the clinic, (3) and environmental activism. By tying together these intersecting areas of ecological grief, I propose four hypotheses that advance an anthropology of environ-mental health or planetary mental health.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
India, USA
Cooperation Partners
Professor Robert Desjarlais; Professorin Jayakumari Devika; Professorin Sarah Pinto; Professorin Anaya Vajpeyi
