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Psychiatry's Culture

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  • Roland Littlewood

    (Anthropology and Psychiatry, University College London, Gower Street, London WCIE 6BT, UK)

Abstract

Culture remains an ambiguous concept for psychiatry: deprecated by the assump tion that it is secondary to biomedical reality, yet at the same time some notion of 'culture' has served to represent the modern against the primitive. Contemporary clinical understandings of culture derive from imperial medicine which had applied the accepted distinction between the biological form and the cultural content of psychopathology to local illnesses which could not easily be fitted into the European nosology. The later concept of 'culture-bound pathology', like the psychoanalysts' 'modal personality', only imperfectly escaped from evaluative assumptions of 'development', but it is difficult to argue that psychiatry provided British colonial administrations with any significant ideological justification.

Suggested Citation

  • Roland Littlewood, 1996. "Psychiatry's Culture," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, , vol. 42(4), pages 245-268, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:socpsy:v:42:y:1996:i:4:p:245-268
    DOI: 10.1177/002076409604200402
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Hahn, Robert A., 1985. "Culture-bound syndromes unbound," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 165-171, January.
    2. Lee, Sing, 1996. "Reconsidering the status of anorexia nervosa as a western culture-bound syndrome," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 21-34, January.
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