Open Windows
This article focuses on two subjects which are central to my PhD research-creation project. First, I present an ethnography of the experience of agoraphobia in Oslo, Norway, the European country with the highest prevalence of this disorder. I investigate the materiality and sensoriality of this experience of suffering. In parallel, I advance an approach grounded in the anthropology of poetry that involves both ethnographic writing and the writing of poems on agoraphobia and panic. I first present a discussion of the definitions of agoraphobia. Often defined as a “fear of public space,” the definitions of this mental health disorder in social sciences are based on a central concept: “space.” In place of this, I focus on the “things” (in the sense of Bruno Latour) with which people suffering from agoraphobia are related in the spaces they inhabit or cross. My theoretical framework is derived from the medical anthropology of sensations as envisioned a little over a decade ago by Devon Hinton, David Howes and Lawrence Kirmayer. I also refer to a famous agoraphobe in my field of study: the painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), who lived the last thirty years of his life in seclusion in his studio in Oslo.