ABSTRACT
Culture-bound syndromes articulate not only personal predicament but also public concerns about core structural oppositions between age groups or the sexes. They have a shared meaning as public and dramatic representations in an individual whose personal situation demonstrates these oppositions, and they thus occur in certain well-defined situations. 'Culture-bound syndromes of the dominant culture' is perhaps a misnomer, for we have found them largely among women. Theories of the relationship between culture and psychopathology have assumed that the notion of 'culture' and the domain of 'psychopathology' are distinct despite many studies of small-scale 'tribal' communities which do not make Western separation between these two notions. Biomedicine offers a powerful and unquestionable legitimate inversion of everyday behaviour. It will not be surprising, therefore, to find that many of 'culture-bound syndromes' are already included in psychiatric nosologies and that others lie hidden in the fringes of general medicine.
