 Sanctified madness: The God-intoxicated saints of BengalAlan Morinis Social Science & Medicine, 1985, vol. 21, issue 2, 211-220 Abstract: The saintly madman is a familiar character in South Asia. To outer appearances he is no different from a lunatic, but the mad saint comes to be revered because his idiocy is popularly believed to arise from a different cause than ordinary madness. The common psychopath neglects social conventions because his consciousness is dimmed by incapacity; the saintly madman also breaches convention, but does so because his heightened consciousness has liberated him from the bonds of convention that entrap ordinary people. In the terms of Hinduism, he has tasted the divine nectar of God-realization and has returned to the human realm intoxicated by the experience. In this paper two popuoar God intoxicated saints of Bengal are discussed. The question is posed whether 'God intoxication' can be considered a culture-bound syndrome of Bengal. The concept of 'culture bound syndrome' is found to be too narrow to encompass the most significant issues to arise from reflection on the characteristics of the God intoxicated. These larger issues have to do with the relationship between cultural practices and models and mental states (whether deviant, as implied by the term 'syndrome' although deviance does not always carry the negative connotation implicit in 'syndrome', or normal). It is suggested that all cultures culture a limited range of mental states and thus the questions posed by the notion of culture bound syndromes are subsumed by larger questions about the relationship of all mind-states to the socio-cultural environment which conditions them. The conclusion is that God intoxication is indeed a uniquely Bengali mental condition, with variants throughout South Asia and kinship to other mystical states, but that the concept of 'syndrome' is not useful. Date: 1985 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:21:y:1985:i:2:p:211-220 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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