ABSTRACT
Among certain South American Indians the absence of a disfiguring skin disease-dyschromic spirochaetosis-was so rare that some anthropologists once felt that it was regarded as abnormal; people without the characteristic skin pigmentation had difficulty in marrying [107]. That different societies have different ideas of normality and abnormality is obvious. It is less obvious how such abnormality is defined and recognized. We have seen that some anthropologists suggest that the mentally ill are those people in a particular community who fail to live up to a very specific type of behaviour which is expected in the community. The World Health Organisation project (p. 117) found, however, that in widely differing societies there is a pattern of experience and behaviour which is similar to our own concept of schizophrenia; mental illness seems very similar everywhere. Are these two points of view compatible? Do they perhaps refer to two different things? Can we define a delusion? Is it inevitable that what is a crazy belief in one community will turn out to be a generally accepted truth in another?
