Illness As A Cultural Phenomenon

This week Sawa Kurotani exaimines how different cutures react to illness in her latest column for Behind The Paper Screen for The Daily Yomiuri:

Anthropologists have noted for many years that illness is a cultural phenomenon, and that our experience of our bodies is culturally framed. That is to say, although people from various places around the world may have exactly the same physical symptoms, we perceive, understand and respond to those physical symptoms through the categories, worldviews and explanations that we have been taught through our socialization.

In the 1920s, Margaret Mead tested the common assumption that difficulty of adolescence was "hormonal," and therefore unavoidable. In her famous study of Samoan youth, she argued that the relaxed and stress-free adolescence of Samoan teenagers demonstrates that it is the social environment that determines whether physical changes during adolescence are experienced as stressful.

More recently, anthropologist Margaret Lock compared symptoms of menopause typically reported by North American women and Japanese women. She, too, concluded that, while menopause is caused by hormonal changes, the ways in which individual subjects experience those changes varied greatly between the two groups, suggesting that the experience of illness is culturally mediated.

Compared to the typical American instinct to pinpoint the cause-effect relationship of illness, Japanese ideas are decidedly fuzzy. Not that one is better than the other; they are just different, and each has strength and weakness. The scientific knowledge of our bodies and illnesses would not have been possible without the Western positivist emphasis on causality. At the same time, this model does not accommodate well those symptoms that cannot be connected to specific causes.

Fuzzy concepts like taishitsu, when misused, can keep people from getting proper diagnosis and treatment, and thus may be dangerous. However, they also let us be kind and forgiving to ourselves. Cultural categories do not only influence our recognition of certain illnesses, but also affect our responses to them.