A Kleinman : Anthropology and psychiatry. The role of culture in cross-cultural research on illness

By A Kleinman, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.

The British Journal of Psychiatry 151 : 447-454 (1987)

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.