Introduction

Summary

The fact of the psychoses is a puzzle to us. They are the unsolved problem of human life as such. The fact that they exist is the concern of everyone. Jaspers 1964 [1923].

Background to the Collection

In the fall of 1986, as postdoctoral fellows together in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Janis Jenkins and Robert Barrett, the editors of this volume, began a conversation about culture and schizophrenia. By the fall of 1996 when Rob visited Janis, then a scholar-in-residence at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, it was time to do something about this conversation. We began by organizing a panel that developed into an invited session at the 1997 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, DC. The session was entitled, “The Edge of Experience: Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity.”

After this meeting, we submitted a proposal to the Russell Sage Foundation to fund a symposium that would assemble an even larger group of scholars working at the interface of culture and schizophrenia. The foundation generously supported this project under its mandate to generate scholarship concerned with the “improvement of social and living conditions.” The three-day symposium that took place brought together twenty-two scholars of diverse academic and professional backgrounds – anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and historians – to report on research that had been carried out in North America, Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Australia, as well as on the international studies of the World Health Organization.