Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T07:19:30.524Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Scientizing Bangladeshi psychiatry: Parallelism, enregisterment, and the cure for a magic complex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2008

JAMES M. WILCE
JAMES M. WILCE
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Box 15200, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200, jim.wilce@nau.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article combines textual, videotape, historical, and ethnographic evidence to describe the Bangla psychiatric register and its enregisterment. Enregisterment is a process “through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable [and] … socially recognized” (Agha 2003:231). The emergence of psychiatric registers in Europe and, later, Bangladesh bore the particular burden of psychiatry's “magic complex” – its need to convince a skeptical public that its perceived associations with magic and religion were finished, vanquished in part by discursive measures, focused on a scientizing drive. Psychiatric Bangla appears to involve the sort of pervasive use of parallelism normally associated with ritual texts. This indicates a profound hybridity that may contribute to the psychiatric unease epitomized in the magic complex.The author gratefully acknowledges suggestions and comments from Carol Berkenkotter, Dan Conrad, Laurence Kirmayer, Barbara Johnstone, Greg Matoesian, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society. Sayeed Ahmed provided enormous help with transliterating most of the letters analyzed, and with translating some. Anna Corwin and other students in my Linguistic Anthropology Lab (fall 2006) helped with figures. Naturally, the author is responsible for all flaws that remain.

Keywords

enregistermentlinguistic anthropologypsychiatrypoeticsparallelismclassificationnatural kindsBangladesh
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 91 - 114
Copyright
© 2008 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Agha, Asif (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23: 231–74.
Agha, Asif (2004). Registers of language. In A. Duranti (ed.), Companion to linguistic anthropology, 23–45. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ali, Mohammad; Moniruzzaman, Mohammad; & Tareq, Jahangir (eds.) (1994). Bangla Academy Bengali-English dictionary. Dhaka: Bangla Academy.
American Psychiatric Association (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV-TR. 4th ed. Washington, DC.
Bauman, Richard, & Briggs, Charles (2003). Voices of modernity: Language ideologies and the politics of inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berkenkotter, Carol, & Ravotas, Doris (1997). Genre as tool in the transmission of practice over time and across professional boundaries. Mind, Culture, and Activity 4:256–74.Google Scholar
Braid, James (1998 [1853]). Neurypnology; or the rationale of nervous sleep, considered in relation with animal magnetism. In J. B. Taylor & S. Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied selves: An anthology of psychological texts 1830–1890, 59–61. Oxford: Clarendon.
Caton, Steven C. (1987). The contributions of Roman Jakobson. Annual Review of Anthropology 16:233–60.Google Scholar
Drinka, George F. (1984). The birth of neurosis: Myth, malady, and the Victorians. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Eliot, George (1986). Middlemarch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ferguson, James (1999). Expectations of modernity: Myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foucault, Michel (1990 [1978]). The history of sexuality: An introduction. R. Hurley (trans.). Vol. 1. New York: Vintage.
Fox, James J. (1988). Introduction. In J. J. Fox (ed.), To speak in pairs, 1–28. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fox, James J. (1989 [1974]). ‘Our ancestors spoke in pairs’: Rotinese views of language, dialect, and code. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, 65–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Friedman, Lawrence M. (1993). Crime and punishment in American history. New York: Basic Books.
Goldstein, Jan (1987). Console and classify: The French psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, Marjorie H. (2006). The hidden life of girls: Games of stance, status, and exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Hacking, Ian (1999). The social construction of what? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Halliburton, Murphy (2005). “Just some spirits”: The erosion of spirit possession and the rise of “tension” in South India. Medical Anthropology 24:111–44.Google Scholar
Harré, Rom (1985). Situational rhetoric and self-presentation. In J. P. Forgas (ed.), Language and social situations, 175–86. New York: Springer.
Hayward, Rhodri (2004). Demonology, neurology, and medicine in Edwardian Britain. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78(1):37–58.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith (1989). When talk isn't cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist 16:248–67.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman (1987). The poetry of grammar and the grammar of poetry. In K. Pomorska & S. Rudy (eds.), Language in literature, 121–44. Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press of Harvard University.
Klaiman, Miriam H. (1980). Bengali dative subjects. Lingua 51:275–95.Google Scholar
Kraepelin, Emil (1899). Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Aerzte. Leipzig: J.A. Barth.
Kripke, Saul (1972). Naming and necessity. In D. Davidson & G. Harmon (eds.), Semantics of natural language, 253–355. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Lee, Sing (1999). Diagnosis postponed: Shenjing shuairuo and the transformation of psychiatry in post-Mao China. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 23:349–80.Google Scholar
Liebeskind, Claudia (2002). Arguing science: Unani tibb, hakims, and biomedicine in India, 1900–50. In W. Ernst (ed.), Plural medicine, tradition and modernity, 1800–2000, 58–75. London & New York: Routledge.
Matoesian, Gregory M. (1999). The grammaticalization of participant roles in the constitution of expert identity. Language in Society 28:491–521.Google Scholar
Mishler, Elliot G. (1984). The discourse of medicine: Dialectics of medical interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Orne, M. T., & Hammer, A. G. (2006). Hypnosis. In Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Retrieved 11 Apr. 2006 2006, from http://search.eb.com/eb/article-247834.
Pacific Rim College of Psychiatrists (2006). PRCP – Pacific Rim College of Psychiatry – goals. Retrieved April 22, 2006, from http://www.prcp.org/about_us.html
Perlin, Michael L. (1997). “The borderline which separated you from me”: The insanity defense, the authoritarian spirit, the fear of faking, and the culture of punishment. Iowa Law Review 82:1375–1426.Google Scholar
Pinel, Philippe (1801). Traité médico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale, ou la manie. Paris: Richard, Caille et Ravier.
Putnam, Hilary (1975). The meaning of meaning. In H. Putnam (ed.), Mind, language, and reality: Philosophical papers 2, 215–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reyes, Angela (2002). Are you losing your culture? Poetics, indexicality and Asian-American identity. Discourse Studies 4:183–99.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas (1996). Inventing our selves: Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosoff, Stephen M., & Leone, Matthew C. (1991). The public prestige of medical specialties: Overviews and undercurrents. Social Science and Medicine 32:321–26.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1972). On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication, 325–45. New York: Holt.
Sidnell, J. (2005). Deixis. In J.-O. Östman et al. (eds.), Handbook of pragmatics online. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Silverstein, Michael (2001). Commentary on Joel Robbins, “Ritual communication and linguistic ideology.” Current Anthropology 42:606–7.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2004). “Cultural” concepts and the language-culture nexus. Current Anthropology 45:621–52.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2006). Commentary on Wilce 2006. Current Anthropology 47(6):906–7.Google Scholar
Stromberg, Peter G. (1993). Language and self-transformation: A study of the Christian conversion narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Matthias M., & Engstrom, Eric J. (1997). Kraepelin's ‘diagnostic cards’: The confluence of clinical research and preconceived categories. History of Psychiatry 8:374–85.Google Scholar
Wilce, James M. (1998). Eloquence in trouble: The poetics and politics of complaint in rural Bangladesh. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilce, James M. (2004). Madness, fear, and control in Bangladesh: Clashing bodies of power/knowledge. Medical Anthropology Quarterly (special issue on Illness and Illusions of Control) 18:357–75.
Wilce, James M. (2006). Magical laments and anthropological reflections: The production and circulation of anthropological text as ritual activity. Current Anthropology 47(6):891–914.Google Scholar