Psychiatry's Culture
Roland Littlewood
Additional contact information
Roland Littlewood: Anthropology and Psychiatry, University College London, Gower Street, London WCIE 6BT, UK
International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 1996, vol. 42, issue 4, 245-268
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.
Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002076409604200402 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socpsy:v:42:y:1996:i:4:p:245-268
DOI: 10.1177/002076409604200402
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in International Journal of Social Psychiatry
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().