Sorting the Culture-Bound Syndromes

Abstract

The present volume contains papers which describe certain of the phenomena usually classified as “culture-bound psychiatric syndromes”, or as “culture-bound syndromes” with “psychiatric” understood. Both terms have long been used to refer to sets of remarkable individual experiences and/or behaviors which some observer has considered to be psychopathological, hence the medical rubic, “syndrome”. Unlike the categories of standard Western psychiatric nosology, culture-bound syndromes are restricted to specifiable peoples and locales, hence the term “culture-bound”. Thus their full explications require description not only of the behaviors and experiences which are considered deviant, but also of the ways those behaviors and experiences are embedded in specific social systems and cultural contexts.