Pain Amongst Turkish and Kurdish Speakers in London

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,

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

expressed interpretation given by the sick individual themselves (local motivation or exegesis) or a more tenuous connection

Whilst we have criticised elsewhere (Littlewood, 1993) anthropology's abandonment of the objectified naturalistic body as one

idea of privileged superordinate explanations about one, 'real', analytical level, which determines subjective agency and intention at

Some topics in this essay:
Umberto Eco, Kleinman Kleinntan, Ernest Gellner, Turkish Kurdish, , littlewood 1997, western scientific, cultural historical, similarity illness,