Cultural Psychiatry in a Creolizing World: Questions for a New Research Agenda

The recent interest of anthropologists in textuality, narrativity and phenomenology has shifted the concerns of cultural psychiatrists toward the consideration of the inner subjective life of persons and their discourses. Most versions of semiologically and phenomenologically oriented cultural psychiatry are weakened by three limitations: (i) the tendency to reify and homogenize cultural systems; (ii) the lack of integration of social and cultural orders; and (iii) the disconnection between local worlds and the global scene. This essay invites researchers to break with out-dated anthropological approaches and explore new territory around such concepts as cultural complexity, creolization, pluralism and boundaries. The emblem of this new era is the immigrant who is confronted with fragmented referential models. We must embark upon a new research agenda that incorporates five main features of our times: (i) people build their experience with reference to creolized rather than monolithic cultures; (ii) representational systems of meaning are embedded in specific social organizational patterns from which culture cannot be divorced; (iii) societies are increasingly dominated by experts, managers and a new economy of knowledge based on functional literacy; (iv) an increasing number of excluded or marginalized persons are claiming the power to narrate their own lives; and (v) the right to speak about the painful experiences of others, particularly when they are mentally disabled or socially excluded, must be reassessed in the face of the policy of political correctness. These elements can contribute to the reconceptualization of a socio-cultural psychiatry that is more attuned to the contemporary world.