Thomas Csordas
Thomas J. Csordas is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego, where he holds the Dr. James Y. Chan Presidential Chair in Global Health, and serves as Founding Director of the Global Health Program and Director of the UCSD Global Health Institute. His research interests include medical and psychological anthropology, global mental health, anthropological theory, comparative religion, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture. He has conducted ethnographic research among Charismatic Catholics, Navajo Indians, adolescent psychiatric patients in New Mexico, and Catholic exorcists in the United States and Italy. His book-length publications include Embodiment and Experience (1994); The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994); Language, Charisma,and Creativity (1997); Body/Meaning/Healing (2002); Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009); William C. Olsen and Thomas J. Csordas, eds. Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology (2019); Janis H. Jenkins and Thomas J. Csordas Troubled in the Land of Enchantment (2020).
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Papers by Thomas Csordas
interdisciplinary research, Troubled in the Land of Enchantment explores the well-being of
adolescents hospitalized for psychiatric care in New Mexico. Anthropologists Janis H.
Jenkins and Thomas J. Csordas present a gripping picture of psychic distress, familial
turmoil, and treatment under the regime of managed care that dominates the mental
health care system. The authors make the case for the centrality of struggle in the lives of
youth across an array of extraordinary conditions, characterized by personal anguish and
structural violence. Critical to the analysis is the cultural phenomenology of existence
disclosed through shifting narrative accounts by youth and their families as they grapple
with psychiatric diagnosis, poverty, misogyny, and stigma in their trajectories through
multiple forms of harm and sites of care. Jenkins and Csordas compellingly direct our
attention to the conjunction of lived experience, institutional power, and the very
possibility of having a life.