Upbeat descant to the descending bass-line of progressive deterioration in the West, the course of schizophrenia in 'other cultures' has long claimed pride of place among the curiosities of cross-cultural psychiatry, a stature neither wholly earned nor unanimously subscribed to. The rumour of recovery from schizophrenia in other cultures made innocent rounds in early ethnographic circles only to be roundly discredited in clinical corridors. The World Health Organization (WHO) studies draw implicitly on the well aged convention of culture as a local model for living, circulating as 'institutionalised canonicity' and embodied as native bent and propensity. Less obviously in play in the epidemiological record, it is everywhere apparent in that literature's shadow self, what the author calls the discursive tradition of cross-cultural psychiatry. The discursive school is still a cottage industry, bearing little of the institutional support or clinical imprimatur that underwrites cross-cultural epidemiology.