While it is the business of medical anthropology to investigate the effects of culture on the appearance, interpretation, expression, and experience of illness, of illness, such investigation has rarely focused on issues of mental health. Consequently, the apparent overlap between mediumship and psychopathology noted by researchers from anthropology and cross- cultural psychology has not been critically examined from this perspective. Mediums, or individuals who regularly enter altered states of consciousness as part of religious ritual, like individuals who suffer from psychopathologies, are likely to have special characteristics-social, psychological, or otherwise-that contribute to their status. This research will treat mediumship and psychopathology as parallel (but not equivalent) contribute to their status. This research will treat mediumship and psychopathology as parallel (but not equivalent) outcomes, and will seek to model the developmental etiology of mediumship. The factors that contribute to mediumship, and the way social environment, in the form of shared systems of meaning, shapes predisposing factors into different types of outcomes, will be examined. This research will use ethnographic, psychological, and psychophysiological methods to investigate the hypothesis that mediums are distinguished by profiles of physiological reactivity, psychological/personality traits, and social/demographic characteristics that overlap with characteristics associated with vulnerability to certain psychopathologies. Of direct relevance to public health is the possibility that differences between notions of disorder and deviance found in cultural environments in which such religious beliefs are prevalent, and ones in which psychomedical paradigms dominate, will contribute to differences in the social interpretations dominate, will contribute to differences in the social interpretation and public expression of individual characteristics, and more importantly, to the actual mental health outcomes associated with them.
| Seligman, Rebecca; Brown, Ryan A (2010) Theory and method at the intersection of anthropology and cultural neuroscience. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 5:130-7 |
