Full Description
This volume explores culture-bound syndromes, defined as a pattern of symptoms (mental, physical, and/or relational) experienced only by members of a specific cultural group and recognized as a disorder by members of those groups, and their coverage in popular culture.
Encompassing a wide range of popular culture genres and mediums - from film and TV to literature, graphic novels, and anime - the chapters offer a dynamic mix of approaches to analyze how popular culture has engaged with specific culture-bound syndromes such as hwabyung, hikikomori, taijin kyofusho, zou huo ru mo, sati, amok, Cuban hysteria, voodoo death, and others.
Spanning a global and interdisciplinary remit, this first-of-its-kind anthology will allow scholars and students of popular culture, media and film studies, comparative literature, medical humanities, cultural psychiatry, and philosophy to explore simultaneously a diversity of popular cultures and culturally rooted mental health disorders.
Contents
Introduction: Towards a New Research Paradigm in Popular Culture
Part I: East Asia
Chapter 1: When Repressed Anger Fights Back: Hwabyung in Korean Popular Culture
Chapter 2: Human Encaged: Hikikomori and Taijin Kyofusho in Japanese Popular Culture
Chapter 3: A Qigong-Induced Mental Disorder: Zou Huo Ru Mo in Chinese Popular Culture
Part II: India and Southeast Asia
Chapter 4: Cultural Syndromes in India: Understanding Widow Burning in Sati and Jauhar through Indian Literature
Chapter 5: The Yakshi Syndrome in Indian Popular Culture: Representation of Possessed Female Bodies in Indian Cinema
Chapter 6: Seeking the Maternal Uncle: A Study of the Culture-Bound Syndrome Known as Nihu in the Karbis
Chapter 7: Old but Still Going Strong: Don Khong in Thai Popular Culture
Chapter 8: Rethinking Amok: Indigenous Identity Affirmation in Malay Legends of Southeast Asia
Part III: America and Native American culture
Chapter 9: The Next Frame Could Be My Redemption: Signature Wounds and Tunnel-Vision Haunt War-Themed Cultural Artifacts
Chapter 10: Wendigo Psychosis: From Colonial Fabrication to Popular Culture Appropriations and Indigenous Reclamations
Chapter 11: Cuban Hysteria. Tracing the Invention of a Culture-Bound Syndrome. (1798-1830)
Chapter 12: Digital Culture-Bound Syndromes: A Sociocultural Perspective on Human-Technology Interaction, Mental Health, and Communication
Part IV: Africa and the Middle East
Chapter 13: To Kill or to Resurrect: Screening the Agency of Voodoo Priests, Sorcerers and Men of God in Cameroonian and Nigerian Films
Chapter 14: Belief in the Existence of the Jinn as a Cultural Syndrome: The Case of Sadeq Hedayat's Fiction
Chapter 15: Ghostly Environments: Faru Rab and the Transnational in Atlantics (2019)
