Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, Ph.D.
Dr. Ozawa-de Silva received her D. Phil. in social and cultural anthropology from Oxford University in 2001. Following that, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard's Department of Social Medicine, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her academic vision is to contribute to cross-cultural understandings of health and illness, especially mental illness, and make a contribution to the field of medical anthropology by bringing Western and Asian (particularly Japanese and Tibetan) perspectives on the mind-body, religion, medicine, therapy, and health and illness nto fruitful dialogue. At the same time, Dr. Ozawa-de Silva would like to stress a critical awareness of cultural biases in medical anthropology, and facilitate collaborative research projects on cross-cultural understandings of mental health and well-being.
Her current book manuscript is on the topic of Naikan, a Japanese indigenous therapeutic practice. Naikan arose out of a Japanese Shin Buddhist self-cultivation practice that was modified to shift its goal from seeking enlightenment to seeking healing in a more general sense, and resembles in many ways the New Religions in Japan. In Naikan, clients sit for one week in the corner of a room, enclosed by a paper screen. During this time, they recollect their past life year by year from the perspective of a person close to them, with nothing to distract them but occasional meals, sleep, and restroom breaks. During this time they are told to focus on what they received, what they gave back, and how they harmed that person. By the end of the week, this sustained examination of their past life often yields powerful experiences of healing that are both psychological and physical in nature. Naikan is fascinating to the medical anthropologist for two reasons: first its situation on the borderline between religion and therapy, with an embodied aspect to its healing practice; and second, its emphasis on memory as a means towards improving physical and psychological health.
Dr. Ozawa-de Silva's latest interest is the relation between psychiatric disorders and religious practices. She is especially interested in the role of meditation in cultural understandings of health, the body and mind, emotion, and its treatment of mental illness and depression.
Publications by Dr. Ozawa de-Silva
