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Discourse, Power, and the Diagnosis of Weakness: Encountering Practitioners in Bangladesh
Author(s) -
Wilce James M.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1525/maq.1997.11.3.352
Subject(s) - dismissal , weakness , power (physics) , face (sociological concept) , psychology , semiotics , sociology , quality (philosophy) , gender studies , social psychology , medicine , linguistics , political science , social science , law , epistemology , surgery , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
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]