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“I can't tell you all my troubles”: conflict, resistance, and metacommunication in Bangladeshi illness interactions
Author(s) -
WILCE JAMES M.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1995.22.4.02a00140
Subject(s) - resistance (ecology) , criticism , power (physics) , consciousness , sociology , psychology , social psychology , gender studies , political science , law , ecology , physics , quantum mechanics , biology , neuroscience
Transcripts of interactions between patients, kin, and healers open up the lives of fourrogi (“sick ones” or “patients”) in Matlab, Bangladesh. I compare the pattern of domination and resistance in those interactions with Western biomedical encounters. Patients in Matlab express dissatisfaction with the power relations of family or medicine through low‐level means that do not enter discursive consciousness. By indirectly calling attention to the suppression of their voices, patients' metacomplaints—a species of metacommunication evident in two of the interactions—entail an incipient cultural criticism.