From the standpoint of an anthropology concerned with the nature and meaning of subjective experience, it would appear to be common place to argue that a the oretically grounded understanding of cultural orientation, self, emotion, and social relations is vital to the analysis of a complex pathological phenomenon such as schizophrenia. At the same time, the study of schizophrenia illuminates the nexus between culture and fundamental human processes and capacities for experience. Although the latter idea may appear novel or undue both in an anthropology that typically by passes schizophrenia and in a psychiatry dominated by neuroscience and psychopharmacology, in this chapter I seek to demonstrate that it is neither.

My argument cuts both ways – not only does the anthropological commonplace hold for the study of schizophrenia, but schizophrenia itself offers a paradigm case for scientific understandings of culturally fundamental and ordinary processes and capacities of the self, the emotions, and social engagement.