1st Edition
Culture-Bound Syndromes in Popular Culture
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.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
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
Seongha Rhee
Chapter 2: Human Encaged: Hikikomori and Taijin Kyofusho in Japanese Popular Culture
Cringuta Irina Pelea
Chapter 3: A Qigong-Induced Mental Disorder: Zou Huo Ru Mo in Chinese Popular Culture
Liu Jinxiu
Part II: India and Southeast Asia
Chapter 4: Cultural Syndromes in India: Understanding Widow Burning in Sati and Jauhar through Indian Literature
Prachi Priyanka
Chapter 5: The Yakshi Syndrome in Indian Popular Culture: Representation of Possessed Female Bodies in Indian Cinema
Raj Sony Jalarajan and Adith K. Suresh
Chapter 6: Seeking the Maternal Uncle: A Study of the Culture-Bound Syndrome Known as Nihu in the Karbis
Sermily Terangpi
Chapter 7: Old but Still Going Strong: Don Khong in Thai Popular Culture
Kultida Khammee
Chapter 8: Rethinking Amok: Indigenous Identity Affirmation in Malay Legends of Southeast Asia
Hannah M. Y. Ho
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
Myra Tatum Salcedo
Chapter 10: Wendigo Psychosis: From Colonial Fabrication to Popular Culture Appropriations and Indigenous Reclamations
Vivienne Tailor
Chapter 11: Cuban Hysteria. Tracing the Invention of a Culture-Bound Syndrome. (1798–1830)
Roseli Rojo
Chapter 12: Digital Culture-Bound Syndromes: A Sociocultural Perspective on Human-Technology Interaction, Mental Health, and Communication
Cringuta Irina Pelea
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
Floribert Patrick C. Endong
Chapter 14: Belief in the Existence of the Jinn as a Cultural Syndrome: The Case of Sadeq Hedayat's Fiction
Masoud Farahmandfar and Saman Taheri
Chapter 15: Ghostly Environments: Faru Rab and the Transnational in Atlantics (2019)
Chelsea Wessels
Biography
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.
