The Butterfly and the Serpent. Essays in Psychiatry, Race and Religion. By Roland Littlewood. London: Free Association Books. 1998. 334 pp. ISBN: 1-85343-400-0 pb.

Roland Littlewood is Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at University College London, qualified in both subjects and particularly interested in exploring how the methods and traditions of anthropology can illuminate the subject matter of psychiatry. This book is a reprinted collection of 15 publications from 1980 to 1996, including important papers originally published jointly with Maurice Lipsedge and Simon Dein. Littlewood and Lipsedge's important book, Aliens and Alienists, appeared in 1982 and has had a major influence on understanding in this difficult field.

It seems to this reviewer that anthropology is characterised by field work and the publication of careful accounts of it in terms of what might loosely be called the belief systems and social structures of the people studied. The descriptions of field work in this book make riveting reading; both of Littlewood's own work in Trinidad, and of his joint studies with Dein of an orthodox Jewish community in North London. In Trinidad, Littlewood lived for more than a year with a group led by a thyrotoxic woman with a set of beliefs in the religious domain that many people would regard as indicating madness. The group insisted upon nakedness for theological reasons. The report suggests an image of Littlewood having to join the group in order to conduct present state examination interviews with members.

Equally readable is the account (emerging from joint work with Simon Dein) of the societal habits of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in North London, which builds on an early case report by Littlewood, giving a detailed account of a patient whose extremely unusual behaviour yielded to analysis in terms of knowledge of the rationale of the group's beliefs.

Littlewood loves theorising. He does it in an extremely scholarly and learned way and, apparently like other anthropologists, keeps referring to psychoanalysis as a sort of default comparator. This seems (to this reviewer) to be a pity, even though some manifestations of psychoanalysis have much to say about symbols (of great interest in anthropology), and the anthropological approach might well leave behind psychoanalytical theories. The theoretical part of the book is not an easy read and many will find that they need to read sentences more than once and to compile a lexicon of the jargon, which is no doubt necessary in this, as in other disciplines.