Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network – Anthropology Channel

Host: Elena Sobrino
Guest: Aidan Seale-Feldman
Book: The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Date: February 23, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode features host Elena Sobrino interviewing anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman about her new book, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line. The book blends firsthand ethnographic insight with critical analysis of mental health and humanitarian interventions in Nepal following a major earthquake. The conversation ranges from the origins of Seale-Feldman’s research, to the globalized nature of humanitarian response, the tension between imported and local models of mental health care, the role of walking and dreams in ethnographic fieldwork, and the intersection of qualitative inquiry with global health data cultures.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Unexpected Shifts in Fieldwork

• Fieldwork Pivot
  • Seale-Feldman began her research in Nepal studying cases of spirit possession and mass hysteria among girls, focusing on translations of suffering between indigenous and psychiatric worlds.
  • The 2015 earthquakes drastically changed her project trajectory:
    • "Suddenly this earthquake happened. … It felt like I couldn't really continue the original work I was doing." (01:22, Seale-Feldman)
  • She shifted to collaborating with a mental health NGO and engaging with mental health as a core concern in the disaster aftermath.
• Lived Experience as Method
  • The author’s own navigation of uncertainty after disaster mirrored the rupture experienced in the community.

2. Humanitarianism: Global Apparatus, Local Tensions

• Prefabricated Humanitarian Models
  • Seale-Feldman and Sobrino note the striking similarity of disaster response mechanisms globally, with a focus on mental health ‘working group’ models.
  • "The humanitarian apparatus is itself a globalist phenomenon… you actually have the same organizations working in different places, sometimes the same people even." (04:48, Seale-Feldman)
• Imposed Futures and Local Realities
  • Humanitarian interventions offered fleeting, sometimes generative spaces for imagining new forms of care, but also imposed limitations:
    • "The types of futures that were imaginable were predetermined by this kind of history of intervention that really placed a big emphasis on psychopharmaceutical treatment…" (05:38, Seale-Feldman)
• Ethical Complexity
  • The book refuses easy binaries, highlighting both the violence and the generative capacities of humanitarian aid.
    • "It's both problematic and can be a form of violence and it can also generate new ways of caring…" (06:14, Seale-Feldman)

3. Mental Health Interventions: Models, Mismatches, and Possibilities

• Imports vs. Integration
  • Discussion highlights the rarity of humanitarian organizations incorporating Nepali, Hindu, or Buddhist conceptualizations of suffering. Instead, Western psychosocial models predominated.
    • "There wasn't so much… effort to really, like, work in that way" (11:13, Seale-Feldman)
• Contradictory Theories of Grief
  • Western counseling encourages talking through grief, but local traditions can view this as potentially dangerous, especially after "bad deaths."
    • "Talking a lot about somebody who's died… can actually strengthen attachments between the dead and the living and cause the dead to be, like, trapped in an intermediate realm." (11:42, Seale-Feldman)
  • Counseling, even if not local, sometimes provides space for taboo or highly stigmatized forms of grief expression.
    • "Counseling became this space where they could talk about those feelings… it's not this straightforward story…" (13:28, Seale-Feldman)
• Beyond Easy Solutions
  • The book insists that both local and imported models can be helpful or harmful; therapy is not automatically liberatory, nor are local resources inherently benign.

4. Ethnography of Dreams: Hidden Narratives of Crisis

• Dreams as Ethnographic Material
  • Sobrino highlights a passing mention of dreams; Seale-Feldman expands:
    • Integral to understanding unconscious processes and affective undercurrents.
    • Examples include the ‘Black Caterpillar’ dream, which she interprets through a psychoanalytic lens.
      • "Maybe I'm the Black caterpillar, and if only she could get rid of me so easily…" (19:10, Seale-Feldman)
  • The ethnographer reflects that a book of only dreams—her own and her interlocutors’—might illuminate disaster experience differently.
• Meaning-making in Unusual Places
  • Dreams surface as sheltering, liminal zones where counselees and counselors process ambiguous or non-normative emotions.
    • "They are expressions of unconscious processes that are going on in the background…" (18:20, Seale-Feldman)

5. The Long Walk: Embodiment and Ethics of Accompaniment

• Fieldwork as Physical and Relational Labor
  • Seale-Feldman describes the literal and metaphorical walking required for crisis counseling in rural Nepal:
    • "All we're spending all this time walking… but then I started realizing, well, that's also part of it." (25:33, Seale-Feldman)
  • Walking alongside counselors not only shaped her rapport but differentiated her presence from NGO supervisors, creating mutual bonds and forms of solidarity.
• Ethnography as Walking
  • Inspired by Tim Ingold’s work, she likens ethnography itself to a ‘long walk’—one that can never fully match insider experience, but creates shared horizons.
    • "We did share a horizon in which we were walking towards suffering and towards people together." (26:41, Seale-Feldman)

6. Ethnographic Knowledge and Global Health Data

• Role of the Ethnographer
  • Seale-Feldman gained rare access to an NGO that valued ‘thick description’ and anthropology, not just metrics.
    • "I met this foreign development worker… who had a kind of understanding of anthropology and wanted like, thick description…" (29:18, Seale-Feldman)
  • Her input helped on-the-ground counselor support and training, rather than feeding directly into global funding rationales.
• Tension with Measurable Outcomes
  • Standard effectiveness and efficacy models privilege quantitative data; ethnographic insight is sometimes seen as supplementary—but can open space for hard conversations and reflection among practitioners.

7. Looking Ahead: New Research Directions

• New Project Preview
  • Seale-Feldman’s next major research shift is to the US, examining the rise of psychedelic medicine in contexts of spiritual and social crisis:
    • "In Nepal, what I was following was the expansion of psychiatry and counseling into a region that has a long tradition of shamanic healing… Whereas in the US, what I see is… a dissatisfaction of traditional psychiatry… and an interest in psychedelics that often bring with them shamanic lineage." (33:17, Seale-Feldman)
  • She frames these two projects as "the Janus face of each other."
  • The new research includes work in clinical trials, underground churches, and with ketamine prescribers.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Shift After Disaster:
  "After kind of grappling with that for some time still in the village, I started kind of looking for ways to put my training to use and ended up working with an NGO for mental health and counseling…" (01:44, Seale-Feldman)

• On Universal Humanitarian Practices:
  "There is a lot of consistency even in the people themselves. And just some of the approaches are obviously taken into different scenarios as a sort of universal kind of approach, type of model." (05:03, Seale-Feldman)

• On Conflicting Models of Grief:
  "This idea that was very important in the psychosocial model, that you have to talk about your grief… but then, something that I point out is that this was actually quite just exactly the opposite of the kind of traditional ways… in both Hindu and Buddhist communities…" (10:50, Seale-Feldman)

• On the Value and Ambiguity of Counseling:
  "It's, it's a more complicated story. And I also think personally that at its best therapy, you know, it's not just this kind of like space where new subjects are produced that might be more productive subjects… it could be a space of freedom for non normative kinds of expressions." (13:59, Seale-Feldman)

• On Dreams as Insight:
  "I attend to dreams in my own… fieldwork. So when people spoke about dreams, or even my own dreams, I would write them down… illuminate something really important about, I don't know about the experience of the disaster…" (18:20, Seale-Feldman)

• On Walking as Care Work:
  "Walking… nobody talks about that. And so maybe I have to just write about walking, which seemed really weird at first, but it just stuck with me as something that was there." (25:52, Seale-Feldman)

• On the Open-but-Difficult Relationship with NGOs:
  "We would use my data… I would talk about scenes that I talk about in the book… And sometimes I would be critical… but they wanted to have them." (30:20, Seale-Feldman)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:00] – The earthquake as a turning point; emergence of mental health as a key site
• [04:44] – Globalized templates of humanitarian response; pros and cons
• [09:02] – Tension between Western and local psychological models; Nepali approaches to grief
• [14:56] – The place of dreams in fieldwork and ethnography
• [22:39] – The embodied practice of walking alongside counselors; impacts on relationships and research
• [27:15] – Ethnography in the context of global health accountability; the value (and rarity) of qualitative insight
• [33:03] – Preview of Seale-Feldman’s new research on psychedelic medicine in America

Tone and Language

The conversation is thoughtful, probing, and nuanced. Both host and guest foreground complexity, resist simplistic narratives, and address moral ambiguities head-on. Seale-Feldman’s responses are reflective and candid; Sobrino’s questions bring out subtle dynamics, from the experimental to the interpersonal.

Further Reading

• The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Aidan Seale-Feldman

This summary provides a comprehensive guide to the episode’s main themes, insights, and quotable moments. It highlights the layered analysis of humanitarian crisis response, care, and ethnography in contemporary Nepal, with implications reaching far beyond a single disaster context.