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

biologically quite arbitrary interpretation is characteristic of recent hermeneutic developments in the social sciences, away from the

of a society's moral laxity). It is particularly in psychological distress or illness that such an analogy may be sustained, presumably

What actually constitutes a plausible interpretation of this sort is none too clear, and historians and social scientists rely on a

lies with what we mean by 'interpretation'. Interpretation is some form of translation, but is it a systematisation and codification of

older sort of psychosomatic medicine -- in which particular bodily symptoms referred directly to a particular psychological

Some common words found in the essay are:
Umberto Eco, Kleinman Kleinntan, Ernest Gellner, Turkish Kurdish, , littlewood 1997, western scientific, cultural historical, similarity illness,
Approximate Word count = 759
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)