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.
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)
Cringuta Irina Pelea is Lecturer in Communication Studies at Titu Maiorescu University, Romania. Her major research and teaching interests are popular culture, intercultural communication, Japanese studies, and public relations. She is the editor of the present volume, Culture-Bound Syndromes in Popular Culture, and has forthcoming chapters in the volumes Confronting Conformity: Gender Fluidity in Japanese Arts & Culture and Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice. She can be followed on Instagram @prof.irina.pelea.
