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Article ID: CBB001551600

Translating Culture and Psychiatry across the Pacific: How Koro Became Culture-Bound (2015)

Chiang, Howard Hsueh-Hao (Author)

History of Science
Volume: 53, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 102-119
Publication date: 2015
Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/0073275314567439

Publication Date: 2015
Edition Details: Part of a Series: History of the Human Sciences in Modern China

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Koro (disease) Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence Psychiatry Science and culture Medicine and culture Epistemology 20th century, late East Asia

This article examines the development of koro's epistemic status as a paradigm for understanding culture-specific disorders in modern psychiatry. Koro entered the DSM-IV as a culture-bound syndrome in 1994, and it refers to a person's overpowering belief that his (or her) genitalia is retracting and even disappearing. I focus in particular on mental health professionals' competing views of koro in the 1960s---as an object of psychoanalysis, a Chinese disease, and a condition predisposed by culture. At that critical juncture, transcultural psychiatrists based outside of continental China---namely, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore---appropriated ideas from traditional Chinese culture to consolidate the clinical diagnosis of koro as culture-bound. This new global meaning of koro was made possible by a cohort of medical experts who encountered the phenomenon and its sufferers in Sinophone (Chinese-speaking) communities, but placed their contributions within the broader contours of the global reach of Anglophone psychiatric science.

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Article Yen, Hsiao-pei (2015) From Palaeoanthropology in China to Chinese Palaeoanthropology: Science, Imperialism and Nationalism in North China, 1920--1939. History of Science (pp. 21-56). unapi

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