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International Journal of Social Psychiatry
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Against Over-Interpretation: the Understanding of Pain Amongst Turkish and Kurdish Speakers in London

Jale Yazar

University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Roland Littlewood

University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

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'.

International Journal of Social Psychiatry, Vol. 47, No. 2, 20-33 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/002076400104700202
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