Neighboring On Madmen

Psychosis is usually deemed a kind of physiological or mental illness in medical science; however, public awareness of madness is not simplified. Taking Dalu Village (in Renhou Town of Yulin City) for an example, villagers' perception and classification of madmen are complicated and diverse. The villagers pay more attention to the relation between insanity and local taboos, rituals, geomancy, ethics, rather than to the simple classification of madness. Dalu villagers classify madmen into idiots, lunatics,sorceresses, and they make detailed classification according to various causes of madness, which contain violating taboos, imperfect rituals, bad geomantic omen immorality, getting bewitched (being poisoned by a legendary venomous insect),being frustrated, and other uncertain causes. Moreover, they have different ways to deal with different types of madness, and hold diverse ideas as well. This study is on the analysis of madness in the local cultural context, and draws conclusions of Dalu villagers' classification of madness and their cures for insanity. Then, based on the local knowledge of mental sickness in the rural society of Yulin, the paper is to enrich the exiting theories of mental disorders.This paper is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is the Introduction, which traces back to the study, puts forward the issue to study, classifies the concerning researches on madness at home and abroad,and propose the significance plus methods of this study. Chapter Two firstly makes a brief introduction of the investigates site in this study——Dalu Village, and secondly explains how the masses define and classify insanity in Dalu Village. The third part of this thesis is on the further classification, detailed causes, and observable behavior of various kinds of madness. The next part is on the different treatment of different madmen in Dalu Village, and the conflict between folk and medical cures for insanity. The fifth part illustrates Dalu villagers' cognition towards different types of madness and the local knowledge under the insanity, and lays emphasis on the following two viewpoints:the ghost possessed and the fairy possessed. The natives consider a man who is possessed by a ghost a lunatic, while they regard a man who is possessed by a fairy a sorceress. Subsequently, the paper is on the dissertation on the inner gic of the above two points. The sixth chapter arrives at a conclusion that madness is caused by social internal causes and local culture and folk cure for madness is supposed to be given definite space to live for the locals have taken different measures to treat different madmen and have formed a system of local knowledge on curing madness.A field survey and a subject-object perspective are adopted in this study. This paper lays emphasis on the relation between local culture an insanity,and discusses the loca cure for insanity in Yulin village from taboo,rituals, geomancy, loand ethics to illustrate the exitence of local treatment and enrich current theories of mental disorders.