Pain Amongst Turkish and Kurdish Speakers in London

3 Pages 759 Words

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
experience (Sontag, 1979).

What actually constitutes a plausible interpretation of this sort is none too clear, and historians and social scientists rely on a
number of rather different procedures (Littlewood, 1997): an identified similarity between illness experience and the presumed
state of other individuals undergoing the same social experiences (the illness as a reified exaggeration of the everyday), a formal
equivalence between an individual and the society which experiences change (the individual as an analogue of the body politic), an
expressed interpretation given by the sick individual themselves (local motivation or exegesis) or a more tenuous connection
between individual illness as a di...