Susto: The Context of Community Morbidity Patterns

shock, holds a special place in medical anthropology. For the past 25 years or more it has provided a convenient springboard tor ethnographic descriptions, for explorations ot the effect of culture on health beliefs, and it has been a common analytical arena for the assessment of stress, social roles, sex roles, the nature-nuture controversy, and the epistemology of medical anthropology itself. While this is a significant burden to load onto a single ailment, susto has withstood this analytical onslaught extremely well and still provides a useful focus for fur ther investigation. The earlier works on susto fail into three broad categories. First are rhose which provide a conventional ethnographic description of the illness (e.g., Rubel 1960,