Embodiment and Enactment in Cultural Psychiatry

Abstract

Cultural psychiatry is concerned with understanding the implications of human cultural diversity for psychopathology, illness experience, and intervention. The emerging paradigms of embodiment and enactment in cognitive science provide ways to approach this diversity in terms of variations in bodily and intersubjective experience, narrative practices, and discursive formations. This chapter will outline an approach to cultural neurophenomenology and psychopathology through metaphor theory, which examines the interplay of culturally shaped developmental processes of embodied experience and narrative practices structured by ideologies of personhood and social positioning. The new paradigm has broad implications for psychiatric theory, research, and practice, which will be illustrated with examples from the cross-cultural study of delusions.

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