Discourse, Power, and the Diagnosis of Weakness

Encountering Practitioners in Bangladesh

Bibliographic Data

ID3012012
AuthorsJames M Wilce (0000-0001-6363-4092, Northern Arizona University, corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume11
Issue3
Pages352-374
Publication date1997-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedical Anthropology Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0745-5194 • E-ISSN: 1548-1387
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/maq.1997.11.3.352
PMID9292862
OpenAlexW1986900437
LanguageEN
Citations received15
References cited46

The author's experiences as a "patient" of nonbiomedical practitioners, and an examination of Bangladeshis' encounters with practitioners daktars [biomedical doctors], herbalists, exorcists, and diviners), reveal the interactive means by which the diagnosis of durbalata (weakness) is constructed. In the cases presented, facing power in the person of the practitioner means losing face. I argue that discursive phenomena above and below the lexical level are responsible. The phenomena described -(1) interruption or dismissal of the patient1 s words by practitioners and others present during the clinical encounter, (2) divinatory routines that assign the durbalata label to women, and (3) one patient's use of "creaky" voice quality in a strictly "popular sector" (domestic) encounter-are nonreferential but socially significant semiotic processes that operate, for the most part, beneath the level of discursive awareness. These encounters and their outcomes have more to do with social reproduction than with any unambiguously effective therapeutic outcome. [doctor-patient discourse, social construction of illness, language and cognition, semiotics, Bangladesh

Dismissal · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept · Linguistics · Political science · Power (physics · Quality (philosophy · Semiotics · Social science · Sociology · Weakness · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology · Surgery