[Ethnicity and insanity: the many faces of abnormality]

This article suggests that the notion of madness varies with the social context, the dominating values of each cultural community and the position given to agents and social workers in the field and in the hierarchy of knowledge. As an interplay of representations and cognitive strategies, madness can be considered as a "symptom" of the "normative" and "reductive" biases of each era, but also as a revealing trait of the sensibility of each culture toward certain dimensions of unusual experiences. Following a review of the magical, prophetic, theological, moral, pathological and analytical versions of madness, the author concludes by emphasizing the necessity of always taking into consideration the cultural standpoint that characterizes the experience of madness as much as it does its study.