From Powerlessness to Control: Psychosis, Spirit Possession and Recovery in the Western Desert of Egypt

M. A. Rashed

Abstract


This article explores an aspect of the cultural modulation of recovery in psychosis. It begins with the idea that recovery hinges on the ability of subjects to relate to their distressing experiences in ways that expand rather than diminish agency.  Based on fieldwork in the Dakhla oasis of Egypt and subsequent analysis, it is argued that interpretations of psychosis as spirit possession offer a broader range of intentionality than biomedical interpretations and therefore broader possibilities of relating to psychotic states. Modes of relating to spirits may take active or passive forms, the former consistent with the recovery goal of symptom control. Factors constitutive of the active, agency-expanding mode of relating include: the nature of spirits; the values and beliefs of the subject; the broader cultural/religious discourses which may make it either more or less likely for the subject to achieve the desired state of control over symptoms.


Keywords


Schizophrenia; Psychosis; Jinn; Islam; North Africa; Spirit possession; Recovery

Full Text:

PDF

References


l-Gohary, M. (1977) ‘Elm al-folklore wal mo’taqadat al-sha’beyya. Cairo: Madbouly Press

Al-Issa, I. (1995). The illusion of reality or the reality of illusion: Hallucinations and culture. British journal of psychiatry 166:368-373.

Al-Najjar, M. (1995). Al-Tib Al-Nabawi Bayn Al-Teb Al-‘elmi wal Teb Al-Sha’bi. Al-Funun Al Sha’bia 46:30-55.

Al-Rowais, N., E. Al-Faris, A. Mohammad, M. Al-Rubkan, & H. Abdulghani (2010). Traditional Healers in Riyadh Region. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 16(2):199-204.

Anthony, W. (1994). Recovery from Mental Illness. In Readings in Psychiatric Rehabilitation. W. Anthony and LeRoy Spaniol, eds. Pp.521-538. Boston: Boston University Press.

Boddy, J. (1988). Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance. American Ethnologist 15(1):4-27.

Boddy, J. (1989). Wombs and Alien Spirits. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Boddy, J. (1994). Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:407-434

Bonney, S. & T. Stickley (2008). Recovery and mental health: a review of the British Literature. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 15:140–153

Bourguignon, E. (1979). Psychological Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Castillo, R. (1994). Spirit Possession in South Asia, Dissociation or Hysteria? Part 1: Theoretical Background. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18:1-21.

Cohen, E. (2007). The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coker, E. (2009). Claiming the Public Soul: Representations of Qur’anic Healing and Psychiatry in the Egyptian Print Media. Transcultural Psychiatry 46(4):672-694.

Crapanzano, V. (1977). Introduction. In Case Studies in Spirit Possession. V. Crapanzano and V. Garrison, eds. Pp. 1-40. London: John Wiley and Sons.

Crapanzano, V. (1980). Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Crossley, M.

Crapanzano, V. (2000). Introducing Narrative Psychology: Self, Trauma and the Construction of Meaning. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Deuraseh, N. (2009). Using the Verses of the Holy Qur’an as Ruqyah (Incantation): The Perception of Malay-Muslim Society in Kelantan and Terengganu on Ruqyah as an Alternative way of Healing in Malaysia. European Journal of Social Sciences 9(3):448-456.

Edgerton, R. & A. Cohen (1994). Culture and schizophrenia: the DOSMD challenge. British journal of psychiatry 164:222–231.

El-Kholy, H. (2004). A Discourse of Resistance, Spirit Possession among Women of Low-income Cairo. In Health and Identity in Egypt. H. Sholkamy and F. Ghannam, eds. Pp. 21-41. Cairo: AUC Press.

Farkas, M. (2007). The vision of recovery today: what it is and what it means for services. World Psychiatry 6:68-74.

Gellner, E. (1992). Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. London: Routledge.

Giles, L. (1995). Sociocultural Change and Spirit Possession on the Swahili Coast of East Africa. Anthropological Quarterly 68(2):89-106.

Good, B. (1994). Medicine, Rationality, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hirschkind, C. (2009). Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Columbia: University Press.

Hopper, K. (1991). Some old questions for the new cross-cultural psychiatry. Medical anthropology quarterly 5(4):299-330.

Hopper, K. (2004). Interrogating the meaning of culture in the WHO international studies of schizophrenia. In Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity. J. Jenkins and R. Barrett, eds. Pp.62-86. Cambridge: University Press.

Hopper, K., G. Harrison, A. Janca, & N. Sartorius (2007). Recovery from Schizophrenia: An International Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jablensky, A., N. Sartorius, G. Ernberg, M. Anker, J. Cooper, R. Day, & A. Bertelsen (1992). Schizophrenia: Manifestations, incidence and course in different cultures. Psychological medicine 20:1-97.

Jackson, M. (2005). Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, And Effects Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Jenkins, J. (1991). Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia. Ethos 19(4):387-431.

Jenkins, J. & E. Carpenter-Song (2005). The new paradigm of recovery from schizophrenia: Cultural conundrums of improvement without cure. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 29:379–413.

Jenkins, J., E. Milton, E. Carpenter, J. Floersch, & M. Sajatovic (2005). Subjective Experience of Recovery from Schizophrenia-Related Disorders and Atypical Antipsychotics. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 51:211-227.

Kleinman, A. (1987). Anthropology and psychiatry. British journal of psychiatry 151:447-454.

Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness narratives. New York: Basic books.

Lambek, M. (1988). Spirit Possession/Spirit Succession: Aspects of Social Continuity among the Malagasy Speakers in Mayotte. American Ethnologist 15(4):710-731

Lambek, M. (1989). From Disease to Discourse: Remarks on the Conceptualisation of Trance and Spirit Possession. In Altered States of Consciousness and Mental Health: A cross-cultural perspective. C. Ward, ed. Pp.36-61. Newbury Park, London: Sage Publications.

Leamy, M., V. Bird, C. Le Boutillier, & M. Slade (2011). Conceptual framework for personal recovery in mental health. British Journal of Psychiatry 199:445-452.

Lewis, I. (1971). Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Penguin: Harmondsworth

Lieberman, J., R. Drake, L. Sederer, D. Perkins, & S. Stroup (2008). Science and Recovery in Schizophrenia. Psychiatric Services 59(5):487-496.

Masquelier, A. (2002). From Hostage to Host: Confessions of a Spirit Medium in Niger. Ethos 30(1/2): 49-76.

Mattingly, C. (1998). Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McIntosh, J. (2004). Reluctant Muslims: Embodied Hegemony and Moral Resistance in a Giriama Spirit-Possession Complex. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(1):91-112.

Morsy, S. (1978). Sex Roles, Power, and Illness in an Egyptian Village. American Ethnologist 5: 137-150.

Morsy, S. (1993). Gender, sickness and healing in rural Egypt: ethnography in historical context. Boulder: Westview press.

Padwick, C. (1924). Notes on the Jinn and the Ghoul in the Peasant Mind of Lower-Egypt. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 3(3):421-446.

Phillips, J. (2003). Psychopathology and the Narrative Self. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10(4): 313-328.

Placido, B. (2001). 'It’s all to do with words’: An Analysis of Spirit-Possession in the Venezuelan Cult of Maria-Lionza. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(2):207-224.

Rasmussen, J.(1995). Spirit-Possession and Personhood among the Kel-Ewey Tuareg. Cambridge: University Press.

Roberts, G, & P. Wolfson(2004). The rediscovery of recovery. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10:37-48.

Schrank, B. & M. Slade (2007). Recovery in psychiatry. Psychiatric Bulletin 31:321-325

Sengers, G.(2003). Women and demons: cult healing in Islamic Egypt. Leiden: Brill.

Sharp, L. (1994). Exorcists, psychiatrists, and the problems of possession in northwest Madagascar. Social Science and Medicine 38(4):525-542

Shepherd, G., J. Boardman & M. Slade (2008). Making Recovery a Reality. London: Sainsbury Centre.

SLAM & SWLSTG (2010). Recovery is for All. Hope, Agency and Opportunity in Psychiatry. Position Statement by Psychiatrists. London: SLAM/SWLSTG.

Winkler, H. (1933/2009). Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt: A Study of Spirit-Possession. Cairo: AUC Press.

WHO (2002). Mental health global action programme. Online: http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/en/265.pdf




DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/hcs.2015.194

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Bookmark and Share