OBJECTIVE To examine public awareness and attitudes toward epilepsy in Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia. METHODS A focused 10-item questionnaire was designed to survey public awareness and attitudes toward epilepsy. Personal interviews were conducted randomly by one author in preselected public places in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia during March and April 2011. RESULTS Seven hundred and for...

Corresponding author: Fahimeh Mianji Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Canada. Address: 1033 Pine Avenue, Irving Ludmer Psychiatry Research and Training Building, Room 134, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1A1 Tel: 15143987302 Fax: 15143407503 Email: [email protected] Zār is the term used to describe a form of spirit possession common in northern African, easte...

This paper considers the link between lexical category and lexical semantics, examining variation in the category of property concept (PC) words (Dixon, 1982; Thompson, 1989)—words introducing the descriptive content in translational equivalents of sentences whose main predicate is an adjective in languages with large open classes of them. Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015) conjecture that nomi...

This article explores the biocultural bases of spirit possession mediumship in the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé. After a brief review of the literature, the article moves beyond the biomedical and social-structural explanations that have dominated the theoretical landscape, by attempting to construct an etiology of mediumship that is traced through the interface of individual characterist...

This article works with theory of ritual in order to begin addressing a series of questions raised by Brazilian spirit possession rituals (in Kardecism and Umbanda). Four contributions to theory of ritual highlight relevant conceptual issues: Humphrey and Laidlaw on non-intentionality; Bloch on deference; Houseman and Severi on social relations; and Kapferer on virtuality. Strawson’s philosophi...