Serious Illness and Supernatural Agents: Explanatory Models for Diseases which Defy Explanation (original) (raw)
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2007
Despite a wealth of literature on the aetiology of somatic distress or somatization, somatic theory has failed to expand beyond a dualistic epistemology of causation. Within the primary health context where medically unexplained symptoms are characteristically articulated as literal, symbolic gestures of internal psychological processes, individuals' subjective accounts of somatic distress are reduced to objective phenomena and thus articulated on the grounds of absence. Within this context, the body as a lived, meaningful , perceiving subjectivity is silenced in favour of the corpse, thus rendering the somatizing individual's lived and subjective experience, expression and knowledge of somatic distress inaccessible. Instead, the somatizing individual is positioned within a domain of perturbed silence a domain in which the professional's turning away or retreat from engaging somatization on the grounds of unique, subjective and corporeal experience, positions the patient...
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This paper looks at the interactions between heat and coldness, magical beliefs, links to family and illness in a small farming village on Wawonii Island, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia.
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This chapter reviews the cross-cultural literature on hysteria and conversion disorders. Ethnographic research suggests that conversion symptoms remain common around the world, particularly in primary care medical settings. Sociocultural processes may influence conversion disorder at several different levels: (1) the nature of illness beliefs and practices and the expression of distress; (2) the salience and availability of dissociative mechanisms; (3) the response of the family, health care system, and larger social systems to specific types of symptom. The higher prevalence of conversion symptoms in some societies can be attributed to the fit of symptoms with local ethnophysiological notions and cultural idioms of distress as well as the stigma attached to frankly psychological or psychiatric symptoms. The distinctive nature of conversion symptoms, compared to other forms of culturally patterned somatic distress, resides in the experience and ascription of agency or volition, which in turn, depends on cultural knowledge and social practices that shape cognitive processes of bodily control. While current psychiatric theory tends to view dissociation (and by extension, conversion) as a consequence of trauma, dissociation can be understood as culturally patterned or scripted and depends on specific modes of narrating the self. Contemporary anthropology approaches hysteria as a mode of self-construal in which narratives of not-knowing and not-doing fit with prevalent cultural conceptions of the person and serve to convey serious distress and disablement.
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