The Cause of Mental Illness from Dumit and Luhrmanns Perspective and

1050 Words5 Pages
The Cause of Mental Illness from Dumit & Luhrmann’s Perspective Does the body or the mind cause mental illness? This question is one of the topics that anthropologists Dumit and Luhrmann explore and try and find reasoning to. They both consider that mental illness is influenced by cultural and social factors, affecting the mind and a persons lived body experience, or that it is biologically innate, which is in reference to the objective body. In this paper, I will be exploring Luhrmann’s, Of Two Minds, and Dumit’s A Digital Image of the Category of the Person to argue the origin and causation of mental illness as both influenced by the objective body and the social body. In Dumit’s A Digital Image of the Category of the Person, he explains that the body is a cultural lived tense and the point of reference for an individual. A persons lived experience changes by social and cultural experiences in life, which becomes conditioned to their lived body experience. Being influenced by cultural and social experiences can lead to objective-self fashioning, influencing a person to bargain with their own identity. In objective self fashioning we take facts about ourselves through society and media and incorporate them into our lives while being an active participant of those facts; shaping a persons mind or perspective as well as an individuals behavior. Therefore, this is why the lived (active) body or social body is cultural, because it is influenced by lived experiences in society. Dumit says that “All human behavior is the result of social conditioning,” however we also have innate “biological limitations” such as personality, sexuality, and mental illness “that might resist being changed by society”, because its something that’s physiologically and biologically built-in. This is the objective body, which is strictly physiological and biologically innate. “The
Open Document