Religious Devoutness Construed as Pathology: the Myth of 'Religious Mania'

Abstract

Contemporary Eurocentric norms and values continue to be superimposed onto various deviant religious convictions and expressions occurring both transculturally and transhistorically. Value judgments as to what constitutes acceptable forms of emotional expression and worship are often made under the insidious neutral guise of science, which is dominated by narrow, restrictive Western concepts of normality. Western-trained social scientists must be more sensitive to the historical and ethno- graphic records and the caveats of imposing moral proscriptions onto unfamiliar or exotic symbol systems.