Textures of care: Rethinking culture and therapeutic expertise in global psy

How are psychotherapeutic approaches adapted and transformed in diverse contexts? This study situates the question in the global yet stratified field of psy knowledge production. Exploring the work of a group of psychological counselors in Sri Lanka, I theorize how such transformation takes shape at the intersection of explicit knowledge and tacit, embodied understanding through the concept of textures. Drawn from ordinary ethics and a phenomenological understanding of habit, the concept points to the felt qualities of interactions and the shared cultural sensibilities and ethical orientations they reflect. Focusing on the counselors’ discourse of “showing the way,” I illustrate how therapeutic practice may be textured, in this case, by forms of moral discernment that evoke Buddhist ethics and by a framing of distress that foregrounds the scene of the problem rather than the client's emotional experience. I argue that attending to such textures of care makes it possible to deconstruct hierarchies of expertise and recognize forms of practice which appear to go against the grain of normative therapeutic frameworks as generative. This makes visible the diverse understandings of emotion, personhood, and well-being that localized forms of therapeutic practice engender within the contemporary, global psy imaginary.