ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Making of Culture-Bound Syndrome in the Post-War Period: Reassessing the Work of Pow Meng Yap

• In Event: Transcultural Psychiatry and the Sinophone Pacific

English Abstract

This paper re-examines the enduring influence of Malaysian psychiatrist Pow Meng Yap (1921–1971) on the post-war development of transcultural psychiatry through the lens of the emic–etic debate. Yap’s introduction of the term “culture-bound syndrome” (CBS) and his systematic surveys of folk illnesses became foundational to cross-cultural psychiatric research. His work on koro served as a pivotal case through which psychiatrists explored how cultural beliefs shape expressions of psychopathology. Yap’s etic approach sought to integrate CBSs into universal diagnostic classifications, positioning them as culturally mediated variations of universal psychiatric disorders rather than as distinct disease entities.
From the late 1970s onward, Yap’s orientation was challenged by a new wave of CBS researcher influenced by medical anthropology, most notably Arthur Kleinman, who coined the term “category fallacy” to criticize the imposition of Western diagnostic categories in cross-cultural research. Kleinman’s “new cross-cultural psychiatry” sought to overcome the ethnocentrism embedded in Yap’s comparative model by privileging emic, ethnographically grounded understandings of illness experience. Yet the enduring influence of the etic framework remained evident in the formulation of CBSs within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV), despite the active participation of emic-oriented scholars in its revision during the early 1990s. DSM-IV’s construction of CBSs continued to subordinate them to standard psychiatric categories rather than placing them in a parallel relationship, an arrangement that epitomized the inclusion of “culture” within psychiatric classification in the edition.
This study argues that the conceptualization of CBSs in DSM-IV thus represents the institutional triumph of Yap’s etic paradigm over the newer emic models. By tracing the theoretical origins of CBSs from Yap’s earlier works to DSM-IV, this study highlights how post-war comparative psychiatry continued to shape psychiatric classification well into the late twentieth century, despite growing critiques from medical anthropology.

Author

• Windson Lin, University of Groninge