TY - JOUR
T1 - The pragmatics of "madness"
T2 - performance analysis of a Bangladeshi woman's "aberrant" lament
AU - Wilce, James M.
N1 - Funding Information:
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at seminars held at the Centre for Development Research, Bangladesh; at the Community Health Division office of ICDDR,B Dhaka; and at the 92nd annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association where it was part of the Invited Session, “Aesthetics, Power, and Medicine.” Fieldwork in Bangladesh during the 1991–1992 year was supported by the Institute of International Education and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. The International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) gave logistical and moral support during the period of fieldwork. Analysis of the data was carried out with the support of National Science Foundation grant DBS-9919127. 1996 fieldwork was carried out with support from the Organized Research Committee, Northern Arizona University. I gratefully acknowledge the transcription work of Gazi Nazrul Islam Faisal, Kazi Asadul Mahmun, and Faisal Rahman. I also thank students in my 1995 seminar, Verbal Art in Anthropological Perspective, and K.M.A. Aziz, Joe Boles, Don Brenneis, Carole Browner, Robert Desjarlais, Jill Dubisch, Byron Good, Neill Hadder, Syed Hashemi, John Kennedy, Keith Kernan, Paul Kroskrity, Nancy Levine, Margaret Lock, Leila Monagahan, Kristen Precht, Dan Rose, Jamie Saris, Susan Wadley, Sushila Zeitlyn and two anonymous CMP reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. The present form of the article, naturally, is my own responsibility.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 1998/3
Y1 - 1998/3
N2 - A fine-grained analysis of the transcript of a Bangladeshi woman's lament is used to argue for an anthropology of "madness" that attends closely to performance and performativity. The emergent, interactive production of wept speech, together with the conflicting use to which it is put by the performer and her relatives, is linked problematically to performance genres and to ethnopsychiatric indexes of madness. Tuneful weeping is taken by relatives to be performative of madness, in a sense something like Austin's. Yet, exploration of the divergent linguistic ideologies which are brought to bear on the lament not only enables more nuanced ethnographic treatment but also has reflexive ramifications for medical and psychological anthropology. This leads to a critique of the referentialism in our own treatment of language. The role played by transparent reference is overshadowed by indexicality and by dialogical processes of proposing and resisting labels for speech genres attributed to the "mad.".
AB - A fine-grained analysis of the transcript of a Bangladeshi woman's lament is used to argue for an anthropology of "madness" that attends closely to performance and performativity. The emergent, interactive production of wept speech, together with the conflicting use to which it is put by the performer and her relatives, is linked problematically to performance genres and to ethnopsychiatric indexes of madness. Tuneful weeping is taken by relatives to be performative of madness, in a sense something like Austin's. Yet, exploration of the divergent linguistic ideologies which are brought to bear on the lament not only enables more nuanced ethnographic treatment but also has reflexive ramifications for medical and psychological anthropology. This leads to a critique of the referentialism in our own treatment of language. The role played by transparent reference is overshadowed by indexicality and by dialogical processes of proposing and resisting labels for speech genres attributed to the "mad.".
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U2 - 10.1023/a:1005323231400
DO - 10.1023/a:1005323231400
M3 - Article
C2 - 9657058
AN - SCOPUS:0032015871
VL - 22
SP - 1
EP - 54
JO - Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
JF - Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
SN - 0165-005X
IS - 1
ER -