Persistent traditional Yemenite ways of dealing with stress in Israel.

Résumé

Using her own clinical-field case material, the author, an anthropologist working in ethnopsychiatry, analyzes and illustrates the contemporary Israeli-Yemenite cultural concepts and therapeutic approaches to mental illness. The sources and content of the traditional Yemenite health system are historically traced with particular emphasis on Judaism as the moral matrix. Despite the continuing identification and involvement with the traditional bases of health beliefs, it is pointed out that this folk conservatism has been no bar to the acceptance and utilization of scientific medicine. The Yemenite has been able to integrate, without apparent cognitive dissonance, both the traditional healers and the modern physicians. The moral approach of the Yemenite traditional healer in dealing with interpersonal, functional disorders, is reflected in the diagnostic and therapeutic behavioral and ritual prescriptions of Jewish religion and Islamic influences. In this connection, there is no incongruity perceived between the existence of the evil eye, devils and spirits possessing a person and the teachings of the Talmud.