Our purpose in assembling the papers in this collection is to introduce
readers to studies of normal and abnormal behavior in Chinese culture.
We want to offer a sense o/what psychiatrists and social scientists are
doing to advance our under- standing of this subject, including what
fmdings are being made, what questions researched, what conundrums
worried over. Since our fund of knowledge is obviously incomplete, we
want our readers to be aware of the limits to what we know and to our
acquisition of new knowledge. Although the subject is too vast and
uncharted to support a comprehensive synthesis, in a few areas - e. g.,
psychiatric epidemiology - enough is known for us to be able to present
major reviews. The chapters themselves cover a variety of themes that we
regard as both intrinsically interesting and deserving of more
systematic evaluation. Many of the issues they address we believe to be
valid concerns for comparative cross- cultural studies. No attempt is
made to artificially integrate these chapters, since the editors wish to
highlight their distinctive interpretive frameworks as evidence of the
rich variety of approaches that scholars take to this subject. 'We see
this volume as a modest and self-consciously limited exploration. Here
are some accounts and interpretations (but by no means all) of normal
and ab- normal behavior in the context of Chinese culture that we
believe fashion a more discriminating understanding of at least a few
important aspects of that subject.
