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Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality, if not mental illness. Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, argues that this view developed as Western psychiatry obscured the political origin of its own disturbing cultural patterns. This work is an approach to psychiatric illness in its international perspective and an introduction to developments in the social anthropology of medicine. It examines critically the relevance of phenomenological, structural and ethological approaches to understanding extreme personal experience. Professor Littlewood argues that anthropology must not simply provide a "cultural" alternative to sociological critiques of medicine, whilst psychiatry itself has to take into account the personal embodiment of cultural values.