Jinns and the Proletarian Mumin Subject

Abstract

This article describes an epidemic of jinn attacks on schoolchildren in contemporary Bangladesh. It explores the ways in which the psychiatric and state health establishment of the country has repeatedly labelled these outbreaks ‘mass psychogenic illness’ and dismissed the widespread local use of kobirajes in these cases. By exploring strategies through which the biomedical establishment has, notwithstanding its own failure to understand or treat these outbreaks, sought to assert the authority of its own frameworks and discredit jinn-based frameworks, I argue that we can glimpse deeper differences between how the two competing frameworks conceptualise the subject of suffering.