In the last few years there has been a great revival of interest in
culture-bound psychiatric syndromes. A spate of new papers has been
published on well known and less familiar syndromes, and there have been
a number of attempts to put some order into the field of inquiry. In a
review of the literature on culture-bound syndromes up to 1969 Yap made
certain suggestions for organizing thinking about them which for the
most part have not received general acceptance (see Carr, this volume,
p. 199). Through the seventies new descriptive and conceptual work was
scarce, but in the last few years books and papers discussing the field
were authored or edited by Tseng and McDermott (1981), AI-Issa (1982),
Friedman and Faguet (1982) and Murphy (1982). In 1983 Favazza summarized
his understanding of the state of current thinking for the fourth
edition of the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, and a symposium on
culture-bound syndromes was organized by Kenny for the Eighth
International Congress of Anthropology and Ethnology. The strong- est
impression to emerge from all this recent work is that there is no
substantive consensus, and that the very concept, "culture-bound
syndrome" could well use some serious reconsideration. As the role of
culture-specific beliefs and prac- tices in all affliction has come to
be increasingly recognized it has become less and less clear what sets
the culture-bound syndromes apart.