Relocating Psychiatric Knowledge : Meiji Psychiatrists, Local Culture(s), and the Problem of Fox Possession(<Special Issue>Social History of Medicine in Modern Japan)

概要

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In Japan before modernity, possession by foxes or other animals was one means of explaining madness, and although some early modern doctors expressed skepticism about this phenomenon, it was not until the Meiji period that the idea of fox possession came under sustained attack, initially by public officials and "enlightened" intellecutuals who attacked it as an irrational superstition. Beginning in the late 1870s, fox possession became the object of exploration on the part of Japanese doctors, who sought to understand it through the lens of German psychiatric theory. This paper traces the attempt by Japanese physicians to "rethink" fox possession and exposes the professional, methodological, and social tensions that shaped this process. I argue that while German psychiatric theory provided a set of tools to Japan's first generation of psychiatrists, allowing them to make sense of their patients' afflictions via new diagnostic and other categories, it also occluded their ability to view fox possession as something other than a manifestation of individual pathology. The case of fox possession thus illuminates the complications of the transfer of a body of medical knowledge to a new cultural context.
2012-12-31