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Anthropology and Psychiatry

The Role of Culture in Cross-Cultural Research on Illness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Arthur Kleinman
Arthur Kleinman*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, 330 William James Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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Extract

To illustrate the contribution anthropology can make to cross-cultural and international research in psychiatry, four questions have been put to the cross-cultural research literature and discussed from an anthropological point of view: ‘To what extent do psychiatric disorders differ in different societies?’ ‘Does the tacit model of pathogenicity/pathoplasticity exaggerate the biological aspects of cross-cultural findings and blur their cultural dimensions?’ ‘What is the place of translation in cross-cultural studies?’ and ‘Does the standard format for conducting cross-cultural studies in psychiatry create a category fallacy?’ Anthropology contributes to each of these concerns an insistence that the problem of cross-cultural validity be given the same attention as the question of reliability, that the concept of culture be operationalised as a research variable, and that cultural analysis be applied to psychiatry's own taxonomies and methods rather than just to indigenous illness beliefs of native populations.

Type
Papers
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 151 , Issue 4 , October 1987 , pp. 447 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1987 

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