Repressed eloquence: Patients as subjects and objects of complaints in Matlab,Bangladesh.
详细信息
- 作者：Wilce ; James MacLynn.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：1994
- 导师：Kroskrity,Paul V.,eadvisor
- 毕业院校：University of California
- CBH：9510372
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：23723833
- Pages：529
文摘
This dissertation explores how power and personhood are constructed within complaint interactions and lament performances. I describe how ideologies of language are brought to bear in these events. During fieldwork in Matlab,Bangladesh I participated in the daily life of an extended family,observing how members made and responded to complaints. I also observed medical interactions at pharmacies and clinics. Of some of these speech events--including trance-possession/healing performances but primarily everyday interactions in domestic or medical settings--I made audio and/or video recordings. Twenty lengthy recorded excerpts have been transcribed with the help of native-speaker consultants both in Bangladesh and in Los Angeles. For over a hundred other complaint interactions--mainly domestic--I have detailed fieldnotes with verbatim transcripts made from memory. I present and analyze transcripts from tapes in the tradition of ethnographic discourse and conversation analysis. The larger body of "ethnographic" transcripts--and a corpus of records ICCDR,B collected on hundreds of visits to one of its womens clinics--I subject to quantitative analysis using sociolinguistic and social-demographic methods,respectively. I also consider the function of complaint patterns as they evolve within a given interaction and over the course of a distress or illness event. My expectation that Bangladeshi "patients" would use somatic complaints to voice other concerns was confirmed,but my pre-field understanding of the way "self- assertion" mapped onto complaints--including the specifics of complaint form e.g. pronoun usage) had to be significantly modified. Complaints in Bangladesh mediate in the complex and sometimes tense negotiative construction of self and other,a process made still more problematic in the cross-currents of social change. Some patients interacting with kin or with practitioners voiced "metacomplaints"--indications that something was wrong with the complaint-interactive process itself. I found that recipients heard and reflected on complaints selectively and that this selectivity is usefully seen as ideological. My focus on how competing ideologies of language are manifested or invoked by the various participants extends language-ideological theory into the medical domain and adds to the medical-anthropological literature on conflictual aspects of illness and healing.