Prof Giulio Ongaro received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2020. His research lies in the areas of medical and cognitive anthropology. As part of his PhD, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Akha people of highland Laos, studying their medical knowledge, shamanic tradition, aetiology, and system of ritual healing. He focused particularly on how healing rituals work and how people think that they work, making comparative analyses across medical cultures. In parallel to his anthropological studies, Prof Ongaro conducted research within the science of the ‘placebo effect’ (the empirical study of how therapeutic rituals can elicit clinically significant responses) in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team from Harvard Medical School. This collaboration led to a number of publications in neuroscience and philosophy journals. At HKUST, he teaches courses on cultural psychiatry, social anthropology, and global history. Bringing all the strands of his previous research together, he is currently writing a book on the global history of psychiatry.

Research Interests

Medical anthropology; animism and shamanism; ritual healing; anthropological theory; ethnography of highland Laos.

Cultural psychiatry; philosophy of psychiatry; philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Global history; philosophy of history.

Representative Publications

Ongaro, G. (2024) ‘Social psychiatry inside-out’ Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry.

Ongaro, G. (2024) ‘Outline for an externalist psychiatry (3): social aetiology and the tension between constraints and the possibilities of construction’, Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry.

Ongaro, G. (2024) ‘Outline for an externalist psychiatry (2): an anthropological detour’, Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry.

Ongaro, G. (2024) ‘Outline for an externalist psychiatry (1): or, how to fully realise the biopsychosocial model’, Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry.

Ongaro, G., Hardman, D. & Deschenaux, I (2022). ‘Why the extended mind is nothing special but is central’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Ongaro, G. & Kaptchuk, T. (2019) ‘Symptom perception, placebo effects, and the Bayesian brain.’ PAIN 160(1), 1-4.