WHAT MAKES HARI RUN - THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MADNESS IN A HIGHLAND PAPUA-NEW-GUINEA SOCIETY

The substance of this article is a narrative about a man considered ma d in a highland Papua New Guinea society, and about his interaction wi th his community and with an anthropologist who tried unsuccessfully t o change the community's negative attitude towards him. It is argued t hat his madness was socially constructed, and cannot be adequately exp lained using a psychiatric paradigm, even if the psychiatric approach were modified to accommodate cultural difference or notions of culture -bound syndromes. It is further argued that the social construction, a dialectic of group and individual praxis, can be analytically context ualized in a moral imperative grounded in the community's kin-ordered mode of production, and can be interpreted as a communal exercise in m oral iconography.