Schizoid Balinese?

Abstract

This contribution explores “schizophrenia” as a contested Western discourse fluctuating between biomedical naturalism and anti-psychiatric cultural relativism. Although the latter was seen as an epistemic counterweight to, and critique of, a modern Western paradigm of normality, I argue that this alternative is couched in a Eurocentric ideology about radical alterity that ignores local interpretations along with practices of social reintegration. I will elucidate this in view of Mead’s and Bateson’s interpretation of the allegedly “schizoid” Balinese and its entanglement with the anti-psychiatric movement, which I will contrast with my fieldwork in Bali that illustrates how deviant behaviour and dissociation are integrated in social life via local interpretations and ritual practices.