The Construction of Hybrid Therapeutic Networks

MARIANO PLOTKIN; PIROSKA CSURI; NICOLAS VIOTTI

Buenos Aires-Shangai

Workshop; The Therapeutic North and South: Towards a new conceptualization of ?therapeutic cultures; 2021

IDES-CONICET/SHANGAI UNIVERSITY

It is generally accepted that modernity introduced a conceptualization of reality organized around a series of polarities associated to dualist thinking: modernity/tradition; human/non-human; nature/culture; practical /scientific knowledge, etc. However, the phenomenon of the “proliferation of hybrids” that Bruno Latour examines runs counter to these binary oppositions, and he posits the emergence of such hybrids as the result of the activity of a particular kind of actor: the mediator. Thus, instead of considering therapeutic networks as more or less stable and homogeneous conglomerates of ideas and practices that fluctuate between a “modern” pole and a “traditional” one, a “scientific” and a “religious” one, in this paper we focus our attention on what is produced in the space “in between.”In what follows we will focus on Adriana, one of own interviewees, who´s trajectory and therapeutic assemblage put in evidence, probably better than any other case, the very notion of hybridity.