A number of studies have explored hallucinations as complex experiences involving interactions between psychological, biological, and environmental factors and mechanisms. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has focused on the role of culture in shaping hallucinations. This article reviews the published research, drawing on the expertise of both anthropologists and psychologists. We argue that the extant body of work suggests that culture does indeed have a significant impact on the experience, understanding, and labeling of hallucinations and that there may be important theoretical and clinical consequences of that observation. We find that culture can affect what is identified as a hallucination, that there are different patterns of hallucination among the clinical and nonclinical populations, that hallucinations are often culturally meaningful, that hallucinations occur at different rates in different settings; that culture affects the meaning and characteristics of hallucinations associated with psychosis, and that the cultural variations of psychotic hallucinations may have implications for the clinical outcome of those who struggle with psychosis. We conclude that a clinician should never assume that the mere report of what seems to be a hallucination is necessarily a symptom of pathology and that the patient’s cultural background needs to be taken into account when assessing and treating hallucinations.

This book is started with the main question, how come some people in the USA believe in an invisible being, that is God. How has belief in God come to influence people’s lives? How has God come to be really present in human life? Almost 100 percent people in the US, believe in God according to a Gallup Poll (Luhrmann, 2012: xi). In addition, religious enthusiasm for American has grown increasingly rapidly. Throughout the 20th century, American churches and congregations have developed remarkably (Luhrmann, 14). Even Luhrmann gives an example about the paradoxical things. Many people thought that the hippie vision would bring radical revolutionaries movement that threated the right wing. As a contrary, Christian Hippies play significant roles in making religion to be able publicly accepted (even though there were on drugs) (Luhrmann 16-17)

No abstract

In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a process called “absorption,” which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practices of other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for “absorption.” Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greater focus, and more unusual spiritual experience. The more they prayed, the more likely they were to have these experiences and to embrace fully the local representation of God. Our results emphasize learning, a social process to which individuals respond in variable ways, and they suggest that interpretation, proclivity, and practice are all important in understanding religious experience. This approach builds on but differs from the approach to religion within the culture‐and‐cognition school.

These observations suggest that the voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorder are shaped by local culture. These differences may have clinical implications.

The history of the way schizophrenia has been conceptualized in American psychiatry has led us to be hesitant to explore the role of social causation in schizophrenia. But there is now good evidence for social impact on the course, outcome, and even origin of schizophrenia, most notably in the better prognosis for schizophrenia in developing countries and in the higher rates of schizophrenia for dark-skinned immigrants to England and the Netherlands. This article proposes that "social defeat" may be one of the social factors that may impact illness experience and uses original ethnographic research to argue that social defeat is a common feature of the social context in which many people diagnosed with schizophrenia in America live today.

Contemporary U.S. religion is shaped by a new emphasis on bodily and trance experience. This article describes the learning process through which evangelical congregants come to use language and bodily experiences in particular ways, which I call here "metakinesis." Through this process, congregants build remarkably intimate relationships with God.

Many people who struggle with psychotic disorder often refuse offers of help, including housing, extended by mental health services. This article uses the ethnographic method to examine the reasons for such refusal among women who are homeless and psychiatrically ill in the institutional circuit in an urban area of Chicago. It concludes that such refusals arise not only from a lack of insight but also from the local culture's ascription of meaning to being "crazy." These data suggest that offers of help-specifically, diagnosis-dependent housing-to those on the street may be more successful when explicit psychiatric diagnosis is downplayed.