PSYCHIATRY CULTURE

Culture remains an ambiguous concept for psychiatry: deprecated by the assumption that it is secondary to biomedical reality, yet at the sam e time some notion of 'culture' has served to represent the modern aga inst the primitive. Contemporary clinical understandings of culture de rive from imperial medicine which had applied the accepted distinction between the biological form and the cultural content of psychopatholo gy to local illnesses which could not easily be fitted into the Europe an nosology. The later concept of 'culture-bound pathology', like the psychoanalysts' 'modal personality', only imperfectly escaped from eva luative assumptions of 'development', but it is difficult to argue tha t psychiatry provided British colonial administrations with any signif icant ideological justification.