dissolved against the background of viewpoints from other cultures. Still,
the idea that mental health is a separate category of experience and enquiry
persists.
Why should this be so? Biomedicine’s own materialist basis leads to this
situation, ensuring that mental and physical health are conceptually sepa-
rated so that‘mental health’emerges as a category. In practice, however,
biomedicine reduces all health conditions to a physical or materialistic
basis, because the treatments that are prescribed are drugs that are aimed
at altering physical aspects of the person, symbolically located in the‘head’
or‘brain’. Therefore, there is no‘mind’that is separate from the‘body’,
and the category of mental health should not have any basis. The reason
why it is still a part of the scheme of things is that it is still symbolically set
apart from other conditions, for two reasons, one pragmatic, the other
belonging to culture and history. The pragmatic reason is that mental
health conditions are recognized to be complex and hard to treat effec-
tively. The other is that‘the mind’has an overwhelming presence in
literary texts and in the imagination of people.“It’s all in the mind”is a
commonplace saying based on the idea that the mind is another world,
akin to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea that“Oh, the mind, the
mind has mountains.”Also, the expression“Nothing is good or bad in
this world, but thinking makes it so”(paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
Act 2, Scene 2) assigns to thought, that is, mind, a paramount role in the
production of meaning in the world.
It is only a short step from this point to an assertion that thinking
produces culture, and culture reciprocally produces thinking, and we are
once again in the world of mentalities. Mentalities in turn are rendered
mysterious because of the perceived elasticity of the imagination. All these
observations are culturally encoded cues that carry much experiential force.
But, according to the way this matter is seen in New Guinea contexts,
everything still remains embodied.
So for the Mount Hagen people of PNGnomanor‘mind’is a real force
in life. It is imaged as located not in the head but in the chest, in a central
position in the body. It is conceptually there, but would not be found if
you cut up the body and looked for it. It is a category of experience and
feeling, not a category of anatomy. Therefore, it corresponds neither to a
biomedical concept nor to a culturalist way of seeing mind as separate
from the body. Whatever thenomanis for the Melpa speakers of Mount
Hagen, it is not the part of the person that turns into theminor life spirit,
after physical death, even though theminis represented as operating
5 NATURE VERSUS CULTURE: A MISTAKEN CONUNDRUM 53