Translating culture and psychiatry across the Pacific: How koro became culture-bound

摘要

This article examines the development of koro's epistemic status as a paradigm for understanding culture-specific disorders in modern psychiatry. Koro entered the DSM-IV as a culture-bound syndrome in 1994, and it refers to a person's overpowering belief that his (or her) genitalia is retracting and even disappearing. I focus in particular on mental health professionals' competing views of koro in the 1960sas an object of psychoanalysis, a Chinese disease, and a condition predisposed by culture. At that critical juncture, transcultural psychiatrists based outside of continental Chinanamely, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singaporeappropriated ideas from traditional Chinese culture to consolidate the clinical diagnosis of koro as culture-bound. This new global meaning of koro was made possible by a cohort of medical experts who encountered the phenomenon and its sufferers in Sinophone (Chinese-speaking) communities, but placed their contributions within the broader contours of the global reach of Anglophone psychiatric science.