In 1997, a team of social anthropologists began working with a team of community psychologists to investigate the nature and incidence of stress and trauma in Mexico and how stress and trauma compare to Mexican-American and other Latino populations in the United States of America. Between 1998 and 2000, the team carried out the first epidemiological study of stress in urban Mexico using four major cities. Subsequently, we have carried out studies of post-disaster stress, trauma and recovery after Hurricane Paulina (Acapulco, Mexico), flooding and landslides (Teziutlan, Puebla and Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico), volcanic eruptions (Ecuador) and fire (Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico). The paper will explore the epidemiological findings from the national study; compare those as well as recovery data to comparable data from the United States. The goal is to understand how stress and trauma manifest themselves in Latino, Latin American, and non-Hispanic populations. We have found differences in the levels of violence and trauma experienced by "normal" populations when compared to US populations as well as differences in the trajectory of recovery between the USA, Mexico and Ecuador as well as between subcultures in Mexico and Ecuador. Similarities include similar conceptualizations of post-traumatic stress, while differences include different expectations regarding expected support from informal networks. In the process the paper will explore how social anthropology has interfaced with community psychology in an effort to develop an understanding of the cross-cultural nature of stress and trauma.

Since the end of the 19. century in certain psychiatric hospitals in Poland, as well as in some other European countries, there has been developed a kind of therapy usually called family care for the chronically mentally ill. It involved entrusting patients diagnosed with chronic mental illnesses to the care of chosen families living in the vicinity of the hospital, unrelated to the patient.

This practice has been based on diverse premises, of which economic factors are not the least important, but for which the central reason is a moral one: the perception of the psychiatric hospital as an environment fundamentally harmful for patients. Anthropological analysis of psychiatric discourse (scientific papers, medical diagnoses, opinions of practicing psychiatrists) reveals deeply critical attitudes towards closed institutions and their effects on the health of chronically ill patients, based on the conviction that long-term isolation causes suffering, which is not justified by the requirements of therapy. Family care, as well as community care, is considered a better way to ensure dignity, provide emotional support and ease the suffering of patients.

Psychiatric practice is premised on knowledge gained in the process of family and community care therapy, which includes analyses of social perception of mental illness and its effect on health and wellbeing of patients.

The paper is based on analysis of psychiatric discourse and on ethnographic research in eastern Poland.

Abandonded and orphan children are doubly victim. Children who abondonded by their parents due to various socio-cultural reasons are placed in shelter homes. They are subjected to various types of emotional abuse in these homes.The present paper is trying to explore four important research questions:

1- How do orphan take shelter homes as their own home without parents?

2- Do children are in conflict with the identity of care-givers? And if yes,how do adust themselves?

3- How and in what ways they suffern emotionally in these homes?

3- What are consequences of their emotional breakdowns and its repurcussion on their personality development?

On the basis these probing question the present paper highlights the emotional sufferings of abondoned children.

Holocaust research is emotional. Because of the sufferings it explores and because of the sources it uses. Important part of these sources are survivors' oral and visual autobiographical reports collected all over the world in the last twenty years. Many of these stories are very emotional - for narrators, for interviewers, for listeners and researchers. In my paper I would like to explore this complicated and multilayered relationship between suffering 'there and then', in the past - narrating them 'here and now', in the present of the interview - and interpreting later on in the research process.

The key category of my presentation is a moral witness (Aleida Assmann). Someone whose testimony should be persevered 'for ever' or just 'for the future generations' and listened to, not so much because of the factual content, but because of the emotions of suffering it encodes and transmits.

Oral history archives all over the world - with the biggest one created by Visual History Archive for Holocaust Testimonies are founded on this emotional basis.

But do these emotions always come 'from there' - from the historical experiences? Or maybe there are rather cultural patterns, social roles and language practices of 'emotional' witnessing and testifying.

I would like to ask his very general questions to concrete interviews - coming from different oral history projects with Holocaust survivors (conducted in different historical moments, in different countries, in different languages) to explore these tensions between 'authenticity' of the 'testimony' and cultural formatting of them.

The paper presents the results of biographical research conducted in Cieszyn Silesia in Southern Poland. The region was incorporated into the German Reich during the IIWW. Those Silesians who did not accept German citizenship were often deported as slave labourers or sent to concenration camps; those who accepted - had to serve in German Wehrmacht. The second strategy proved more risky as only half of conscripts servived. After the war some Silesians and those Germans who remained in the area suffered persecutions, were deprived of their property and imprisoned. But in the public sphere only the victims of the Natzis were recognized and their sufferings acknowledged by the communist state. Feelings of those who lost their fathers or sons in the German Army were concealed in the public sphere, the same was with those who suffered oppression after the war. They spoke about it only withing the close circle of family and friends. For some old Silesians this is still a taboo, others started to tell about their experiences, but their stories are very laconic as if they feel that only "proper" victims (from Polish nationalistic point of view) could express their emotions in the public. It is also important who is a listener. Being a native-anthropologist with Silesian background I could elicit more emotionally charges narrations than my Polish students did.

The paper is informed by Foucaultian tradition and anthropological theories of Lilla Abu-Lughod, Catherin Lutz, Maruska Svacek and Helena Wulf.

The development of medicine and reproductive techinques as well as growing social valuation of a child perceived as fully human even in a very early stage of foetal development, often makes the expectant parents equal pregnancy loss with the death of their child. In Polish context such an attitude is additionally reinforced by public debates on the anti-abortion law and by the definite stand of the Catholic Church granting aborted foetuses their undeniably human status. Nevertheless, the social interpretation of miscarriage remains ambiguous due to the Church neglect, insensitive attitude of medical stuff and the silence of social environment used to treat pregnancy loss rather as a reproductive affliction then social death. Parents experiencing miscarriage are therefore left with their grief suffering additionally because of non-recognition of their loss.

The experience of spontaneous miscarriage puts expectant parents in a very complex and ambiguous emotional state caused by the contradictory influence of biomedicine, popular culture and common attitude. Mixed emotions surrounding the experience of miscarriage also reveal the political undercurrents of debates on the human status of foetus. Despite the socio-cultural model of its concealment, the open expression of grief and extended bereavement becomes an instrument of political power used by parents after miscarriage to change the social meaning of pregnancy loss as well as to achieve other more specific goals.