The aim of this contribution is twofold: First, it shows methodologically an ethnographic mode of research that we call co-laborative. This mode enables new forms of reflexivity in European Ethnology and makes them analytically productive. Second, we argue on the basis of such a colaborative research with social psychiatry that the dominant analytical dichotomies of the social and cultural sciences – namely normal vs. pathological or care vs. control – only insufficiently describe today’s psychiatric treatment processes. Our ethnographic material shows how ‘normal everyday life’ is choreographed in hospitals for therapeutic purposes, and how this choreographing becomes problematic in post-clinical everyday lives. On the basis of these findings we discuss the extent to which a practice theoretical approach can extend the established critique of subjectification by focusing on the processuality of psychiatric treatment and thus problematizing the multiple embeddedness of the production of everyday life in clinical and urban environments.

Keywords
collaboration, choreography, psychiatry, theory of practice, everyday life, city