Disease, Illness, and Sickness: The Difficulty of Classification. The Example of Saka in The Malay World

Abstract

Saka is a medical disorder that appears in the Malay speaking world. However, it is difficult for medical or psychological experts to denote whether it fits one of the well-known categories like disease, illness, and sickness. In psychiatry, the term Culture-Bound-Syndrome (CBS) was introduced to cover psychiatric abnormalities, and in the Malay speaking world, CBS like amok and latah are well-known. In this article, the authors argue that the Western concepts and categories might not suffice to understand and categorize emic concepts of non-Western societies. The authors conducted qualitative field research in the North-eastern Malaysian state of Kelantan. Kelantan is considered to be a traditional Malay state. The researchers observed and interviewed five persons with saka. They discovered that there are no uniform patterns of people with the medical disorder of saka.