Discourse, Power, and the Diagnosis of Weakness

Encountering Practitioners in Bangladesh

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3012012
AutoresJames M Wilce (0000-0001-6363-4092, Northern Arizona University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1997
Volumen11
Número3
Páginas352-374
Fecha de publicación1997-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMedical Anthropology Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0745-5194 • E-ISSN: 1548-1387
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/maq.1997.11.3.352
PMID9292862
OpenAlexW1986900437
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas46

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