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Genograms of exile and return families in Croatia - A medical anthropological approach

This article presents the most important results of an applied anthropological long-term study of the prolonged exile and return that many families are currently undergoing in Croatia. The results are elaborated with a special reflection upon two important overlapping issues concerning the methodological approach that was applied: firstly, it discusses the crucial questions which motivated the search for a tool that will not distort the experiences, reality and suffering of exile families ; and secondly, it critically describes the application of the genogram (a tool borrowed from systemic family therapy) in the exile setting. This tool was not only useful in the clinical sense of psychotherapeutically helping the families, but was also a very flexible part of the methodology orientated towards evoking family history and providing valid knowledge about different family and living circumstances. The argument of this article, above all, falls precisely in the domain of concern that critical medical anthropologists have been expressing in the past decades, through stressing the lack of understanding and will to acknowledge the importance of wider social contexts into our research agendas, non to mention the appreciation that people in exile had life’s prior to their refuge.

genograms; exile; anthropology

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