Angst_in_London

Angst in London SUMMARY The understanding of experienced pain has recently moved from the biological to the metaphorical. Detailed interviews with twelve Turkish and Kurdish patients in London who had been unsuccessfully investigated medically for chronic pain showed that their understanding reflected local, typically humoural, conceptions of self and body. However there was little to suggest interpretation of the illness as a more specific and grounded idiom for social or political experience. It is suggested that the current vogue for 'interpretation' in medical anthropology and social psychiatry may occasionally be, as Umberto Eco puts it, 'over-interpretation'. INTRODUCTION It is common in cultural and historical theorising to attribute changing social patterns to some 'deeper' transformation of self or society, such that fashionable hemlines or illnesses represent changing class relations, gender roles, social crises, or whatever (Littlewood, 1997). At its most sophisticated, this logic presumes an affinity between a wider social patterning and its individual cultural manifestation as an illness (eg. Kenny, 1980); sicknesses are taken as characteristic of their age or of shared social, illness, understanding, individual, body, themselves, sort, particular, interpretation, experience, between, thinking, sense, pain, metaphorical, littlewood, cultural, argument, 1997, within, western, typically, symptoms, specific, society, similarity, sick, self, scientific, represent, recent, rather, presumably, physical, part, now, naturalistic, moved, medicine, medical, local, kleinman, individuals, historical, experiences, example, events, different, characteristic, changing