Book Review: Transcultural Psychiatry: Revenge of the Windigo. The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal People

Transcultural Psychiatry Revenge of the Windigo. The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal People. James B Waldram. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; 2004. 414 p. CANS29.95. Reviewer rating: Very good. JB Waldram, a medical anthropologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan, spent considerable time in Algonkian communities in Northern Canada, where he heard stories of the windigo, the cannibal monster. In this book, he presents a remarkable critical review of studies of North American Aboriginal people. He tries to show how 3 disciplinesanthropology, psychology, and psychiatrycreated and distorted our image of Aboriginal people. The author does not offer new data but, rather, points out the problems scholars and researchers have encountered with concepts, methods, and theories-problems that have led to questionable conclusions and generalizations often devoid of historical and social context. The book has 12 chapters divided into 3 parts. The first part reviews efforts in the first half of the 20th century to identify basic Aboriginal personality structure; it discusses classic approaches by anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict and her contemporaries, who were influenced by the pioneering work of Franz Boas. Their projects aimed to preserve the vanishing North American Aboriginal cultures and explore their patterns. Benedict's work is criticized for omissions or selective use of nonconforming data, for example, in regard to violence and alcohol abuse (p 25). Waldram concludes that Benedict's classic examination was fundamentally flawed (p 26). He describes the emergence of psychoanalytical anthropology and the influence of Sigmund Freud's evolutionary ideas that sought parallels between primitive people and neurotic behaviour. Culture-andpersonality studies came under attack by the middle of the 20th century, however, with new interest in the trait list approach to personality and problems of acculturation. One of the most documented efforts to focus on the psychological consequences of acculturation was the Indian Education and Administration Research Project, initiated in 1941 at the University of Chicago. This interdisciplinary project aimed to improve Indian schooling and administration. It involved some 50 eminent scientists and used standardized psychological tests such as the Rorschach, Thematic Apperception Test, Goodenough Draw-A-Man, Wechsler Intelligence Scales, and other methods. The tests might have failed to measure Native intelligence, but they helped to refine crosscultural techniques. Some of the monographs produced became ethnographic classics, although cautionary notes warned readers not to overgeneralize. The project was a testing ground for cooperation among anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalytic psychiatrists. Anthropologists persevered in their use of tests and generated psychological profiles for many different Aboriginal North American groups. Rorschach was useful for cross-cultural comparison, although some results were too general or vague to be of value. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was also widely used, but acculturation and socioeconomic status-especially education or occupation-affected scores on the abbreviated MMPI 168-item scale. Psychometric approaches to the study of personality and intelligence attempted to capture the essence of the Aboriginal in terms of a few items and scale scores used to differentiate among groups and cultures-but whatever culture is, it is certainly not simply a variable (p 101). The second part of the book examines both early and contemporary studies of Aboriginal psychopathology, with specific attention to concepts of acculturative stress. Some early acculturation studies held the view that Utopian, genuine, internally harmonious Aboriginal cultures existed before the arrival of Europeans. …

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