Book excerpt: This book provides a unique study in social and cultural psychiatry, carried out in an African-American community in the rural South. Using a combination of concepts and methods from anthropology and social epidemiology, the specific social and psychological risk factors for depression are examined. The author places special emphasis on how that risk is modified by the social and historical context of the Black community in the United States, and suggests a new basis for the sociocultural comparative study of health and disease.