ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Transcultural Psychiatry and the Sinophone Pacific

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel revisits the history of transcultural psychiatry from the viewpoint of the Sinophone Pacific. The first two papers (Alex Liu and Windson Lin) focus on the work of two experts who pioneered the field of transcultural psychiatry: the Taiwan-based Hsien Rin and the Hong Kong-based Pow Meng Yap. Whereas Rin’s movement in transpacific networks—from Japan and Taiwan to Hawaii and Canada—consolidated the cultural relativism of Japaneseness and Chineseness in Cold War medicine, Yap’s coinage of the concept “culture-bound syndrome” handed psychiatry a powerful organizing principle with which the etic approach to cultural medicine triumphed over the emic approach, a trend that culminated in the classification of culture-bound nosology in DSM-IV. The second set of papers (Hsuan-Ying Huang and Howard Chiang) focus the history of transcultural psychiatry through the cultural biography of specific clinical conditions: neurasthenia and koro. The former is famously associated with the work of Arthur Kleinman, who is typically understood to have foregrounded a cross-cultural interpretation of psychological distress in terms of somatic manifestations. A reassessment of Kleinman’s contribution reveals the enduring relevance of his early questions and conclusions to contemporary China, especially with respect to the rising popularity of “political depression.” The condition of koro—genital retraction syndrome—served as a key exemplar for Yap’s thinking about culture-bound syndrome; in fact, Chinese koro was upheld by DSM-IV as a role model for considering other culture-bound syndromes in the 1990s. However, placing this development within a longer historical trajectory reestablishes koro as a paradigm in transcultural psychiatry. The DSM-IV decision anchored its broader epistemic traction in the global circulation of ideas about Chinese culture and medical knowledge.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Ana Antic, University of Copenhagen

Individual Presentations

• Translating East Asian Psyches: Cold War Transculturalists and the Making of Japaneseness and Chineseness across the Pacific - Alex Hsu-Chun Liu, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

• The Making of Culture-Bound Syndrome in the Post-War Period: Reassessing the Work of Pow Meng Yap - Windson Lin, University of Groninge

• Politicization Postponed: Political Depression as an Afterlife of Neurasthenia in Contemporary China - Hsuan-Ying Huang, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

• Koro as a Paradigm in Transcultural Psychiatry - Howard Chiang, University of California, Santa Barbara

Session Organizer

• Howard Chiang, University of California, Santa Barbara