Although the term "culture-bound syndrome" has been used for many years, a concise definition has not been available. The less precise synonym "folk illness" has implied that such syndromes exist only in other cultures. This paper provides a four-part definition to permit examination and comparison of disease categories in any system, including biomedicine.
Anthropologists have tended to view biomedicine as the standard for comparison, and have not examined it in the same critical fight as other systems. This may be due in part to a confusion of the biomedical classificatory system (biomedicine per se, emic level) with the biological data on which in is based (etic level). One can in fact retain use of the biological data while analyzing biomedicine, which is understood to include cultural components.
Mild-to-moderate obesity in the U.S. today fits the proposed definition of a culturebound syndrome. This paper offers a brief overview of the evidence that culture has shaped both the definition of the disease over time and its treatment.
However, another fundamental issue has been relatively less frequently addressed -that is, the cultural construction of disease categories. As a physical anthropologist, I am impressed with the great amount of human biologic diversity. Yet that diversity is not random. The order comes both from the nonrandom geographic distribution of minor genetic variations and from the range