Speaking About Culture in Multiple Voices

Abstract

As a mark of gratitude to Alexander Leighton, this article engages him in a dialogue, reopening several debates that were enriched by his research and reflections on ethics, the ‘aesthetic dimension’ of the research enterprise, the processes that mediate between collective and individual variables, and his strong distrust of theory. The authors discuss some of the features of Leighton's perspective that they have retained and transformed in their own work on community responses to chronic mental illness in rural Quèbec, on the course of schizophrenia in India, and on culture and psychosis in clinical settings in Montrèal. The challenge remains the one that Leighton identified: how can findings derived from different disciplines be made to co-ordinate? The authors argue that this question must be answered from within the centre of each discipline rather than from their frontiers or zones of interface.