Abstract
Generations of scholars have debated hair’s significance as a symbol of womanhood, fertility, and spiritual morality in South India. For contemporary Indian women, hair is a site of concern, often expressed as an everyday preoccupation with hair loss or “hair fall,” as it is known in the subcontinent. This exploratory study investigated hair fall among Kannada-speaking Hindu women in the South Indian city of Mysuru, Karnataka. It used a series of focus group discussions to explore how women talk about the causes and consequences of hair fall, and how women cope with hair-related distress. Participants articulated clear, shared ideas about why hair falls and how it can be managed. They connected hair fall to broader stressors in their lives both directly and symbolically. Hair fall, therefore, appears to function idiomatically in this context, both as an idiom of distress in its own right, and as a symptom of other idioms and forms of distress. Additional research is needed to establish the importance of hair fall relative to other distress constructs, and to more directly assess its potential value in research and intervention.
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Notes
Even though idioms of distress can be used toward this de-centering end, the approach has also been critiqued for its tendency to exoticize practices that fall outside the Western “standard” of biomedical psychiatry (Hinton and Lewis-Fernández 2010; Littlewood 2002). This potential to exoticize is particularly evident the incorporation of idioms of distress and cultural syndromes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the “bible” of diagnostic criteria for biomedical psychiatry. In versions 4 and 5 of the manual, cultural syndromes and idioms of distress appear in appendices which, scholars note, position them as “highly localized and confined, almost like a museum of anthropological curiosities” (La Roche et al. 2015:186). The easiest position from which to identify idioms for potential use in culturally sensitive mental health services is often the outsider position, which does indeed run the risk of “othering” (Hinton and Lewis-Fernández 2010).
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge Ruhika Prasad, Sarah Taylor, Joyce Flueckiger, Archana Venkatesan, Anuska Narayanan, Shivamma N., and the entire PHRII staff, as well as grants from the University of Oregon Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation and College of Arts and Sciences.
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Weaver, L.J., Krupp, K. & Madhivanan, P. The Hair in the Garland: Hair Loss and Social Stress Among Women in South India. Cult Med Psychiatry 46, 456–474 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09725-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09725-6