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