INTERPRETING CULTURE AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY - PRIMITIVIST THEMES IN CROSS-CULTURAL DEBATE

Interpreting the cross-cultural incidence of psychopathology is a focu s of continuing debate. This paper explores the lineaments of that deb ate and its underlying premises concerning difference and distance. Pr imitivism - a body of ideas, images and vocabularies about cultural ot hers - is characteristically employed to represent non-Western peoples . But it is more fundamentally concerned with the way the West underst ands itself in contradistinction to these others. It is shown to be a major source of the images used to think about mental illness, and of the intellectual traditions which have constituted cross-cultural psyc hiatry as a comparative discipline. Psychiatric primitivism employs tw o opposing perspectives, which we have labelled 'Barbaric' and 'Arcadi an' respectively. They are the source of contradictory assertions conc erning the relationship between culture and mental illness. They provi de the framework which structures contemporary research into the cros- scultural incidence and course of schizophrenia, shaping its methodolo gy, its rhetoric, the strategies by which data are interpreted, and th e conclusions which it draws. We demonstrate a convergence of themes w hereby images of society, person and mental illness come to signify ea ch other. This is epitomized in three of cross-cultural psychiatry's p rincipal subject areas: amok, shamanism, and the therapeutic quality o f 'traditional' society.