Abstract
This paper presents the results of a larger study conducted among Southern Sudanese refugees in Cairo, Egypt. “Illness talk” and body metaphors are the focus of the present work, which is based mainly on an analysis of the illness narratives of people attending a church-run medical clinic. The findings suggest that refugees use certain narrative styles in discussing their illnesses that highlight the interconnection of bodily ills and refugee-related trauma. The refugees narrated the histories of their illnesses in terms consistent and coterminous with their refugee histories, and articulated illness causes in terms of threatening assaults on their sense of self as human beings and as part of a distinct community and culture. The use of embodied metaphors to understand and cope with their current and past traumatic experiences was echoed in narratives that were nonillness related. Metaphors such as “the heart,” “blood,” and “body constriction” were consistently used to discuss social and cultural losses. Understanding the role that the body plays in experience and communication within a given cultural context is crucial for physicians and others assisting refugees.
Access this article
We’re sorry, something doesn't seem to be working properly.
Please try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, please contact support so we can address the problem.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Becker, Gay 1997 Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Casey, E. 1987 Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Comaroff, J. 1983 The Defectiveness of Symbols or Symbols of Defectiveness? On the Cultural Analysis of Medical Systems. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 7 (1): 3-20.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1993 Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Antropology 8 (2): 135-156.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground and Self. Cambridge University Press.
Das, Veena 1997 Language and the Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain. In Social Suffering. A. Kleinman, V. Das, and M. Lock, eds., pp. 67-91. Berkeley: University of California Press.
De Girolamo, Giovanni 1994 Primary Health Care of Refugees: In Amidst Peril and Pain: The Mental Health and Well-Being of the world's Refugees. A.J. Marsella, T. Bornemann, S. Ekblad, and J. Orley, eds.,pp. 263-274. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Deng, F.M. 1972 The Dinka of the Sudan. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.
Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and Danger. New York: Praeger.
Douglas, Mary 1973 Natural Symbols. New York: Vintage Books.
Du Boulay, Juliet 1984 The Blood: Symbolic Relationships Between Descent, Marriage, Incest Prohibitions and Spiritual Kinship in Greece. Man 19: 533-556.
Ferreira, Mariana K. Leal 1998 Slipping Through Sky Holes: Yurok Body Imagery in Northern California, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 22 (2): 171-202.
Foucalt, Michel 1975 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucalt, Michel 1977 What Is an Author? In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Donald F. Bouchard, ed., pp.124-127.Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press.
Frank, Arthur W. 1995 The Wounded story-Teller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Frankenberg, Ronald 1986 Sickness as Cultural Performance: Drama, Trajectory, and Pilgrimage: Root Metaphors and the Making social of Disease. International Journal of Health Services 16 (4):603-626.
Frazer, James G. 1890[1981] The Golden Bough. New York: Gramercy Books.
Gold, Steven 1989 Differential Adjustment Among New Immigrant Family Members. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 17 (4): 408-434.
Good, Byron J. 1977 The Heart of What's the Matter: The Semantics of Illness in Iran, culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1(1): 25-28.
Goslinga-Roy, G.M. 2000 Body Boundaries, Fiction of the Female Self: An Ethnographic Perspective on Power, Feminism and the Peproductive Technologies. Feminist Studies 26 (1): 113-140.
Green, Maia 1996 Medicines and the Embodiment of Substances among Pogoro Catholics, Southern Tanzania, Journal of the royal Antropological Institute 2 (3): 485-498.
Harding, T., M. De Aragano, J. Baltazar, C. Climent, H.H.A. Ibrahim, L. Ladrigo-Ignacio, R.S. Murthy, and N.N. Wig 1980 Mental Disorders in Primary Health Care: A Study of the frequency and diagnosis in Four Developing Countries. Psychological Medicine 10: 231-241.
Harkin, Michael 1994 Contested Bodies: Affliction and Power in Heilsuk Culture and History. American Ethnologist 21 (3): 586–605.
Holland, D., and A. Kipnis 1994 Metaphors for Embarrassment and Stories of Exposure: The Not-So-Egocentric Self in American Culture. Ethos 22: 316–342.
Jablensky, Assen, A.J. Marsella, Solvig Ekblad, Lennart Levi, and Bengt Jansson 1992 The International Conference on the Mental Health and Well-Being of the World's Refugees and Displaced Persons. Stockholm, Sweden, October 6-11, 1991. NewYork: Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, Janis H. 1991 The State Construction of Affect:Political Ethos and Mental Health Among Salvadoran Refugees. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 15 (2): 139-165.
Jenkins, Janis Hunter, and M. Valiente 1994 Bodily Transactions of the Passions: El Calor AmongSalvadoran Women Refugees. In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self.
Thomas J. Csordas, ed., pp.163-182. Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, D.H. 2003 Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Kirmayer, L.J. 1988 Mind and Body as Metaphors: Hidden Values in Biomedicine. In Biomedicine Examined. M. Lock and D. Gordon, eds., pp. 57-93. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Kleinman, A. 1980 Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland Between Anthropology, Medicine and Psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kleinman, A. 1989 The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books.
Kugelmann, Robert 1997 Narratives of Chronic Pain. In The Anthropology of Medicine: From Culture to Method, 3rd ed. Lola Romanucci-Ross, Daniel E. Moerman, and Laurence R. Tancredi, eds., pp. 254–272. Westport: Bergin and Garvey.
Lesch, Ann Mosely 1998 The Sudan: Contested National Identities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Lock, Margaret 1990 The Politics of Identity Breaking and Making in Canada, or, Nevra on Sunday. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14 (2): 237–254.
Low, Setha M. 1994 Embodied Metaphors: Nerves as Lived Experience. In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology. Thomas J. Csordas, ed., pp. 139-162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malkki, L. 1995 Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
McSpadden, Lucia Ann, and Helene Moussa 1993 I Have a Name: The Gender Dynamics in Asylum and in Resettlement of Ethiopian and Eritrean Refugees in North America. Journal of Refugee Studies 6 (3):203–225.
Muecke, Marjorie A. 1995 Trust, Abuse of Trust, and Mistrust AmongCambodian Refugee Women: ACultural Interpretation. In Mistrusting Refugees. E. Valentine Daniel and John C. Knudsen, eds., pp. 36–55. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nichter, Mark 1981 Idioms of Distress: Alternatives in the Expression of Psychosocial Distress: A Case Study From South India. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 5 (4): 379–408.
Orley, John 1994 Psychological Disorders among Refugees: Some Clinical and Epidemiologi-cal Considerations. In Amidst Peril and Pain: The Mental Health and Well-being of the World's Refugees. A.J. Marsella, T. Bornemann, S. Ekblad, and J. Orley, eds., pp. 193–206. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Ots, Thomas 1990 The Angry Liver, the Anxious Heart, and the Melancholy Spleen: The Phenomenology of Perceptions in Chinese Culture. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14 (1): 21–58.
Peltzer, K. 1999 Trauma and Mental Health Problems of Sudanese Refugees in Uganda. The Central African Journal of Medicine 45 (5): 110–113.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret Lock 1987 The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1: 6–41.
Seligman, C.G., and B.Z. Seligman 1965 Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Skultans, Vieda 2000 Editorial. Narrative Illness and the Body. Anthropology and Medicine 7 (1): 5–14.
Swartz, Marc J. 1997 Illness and Morality in the Mombasa Swahili Community: A Metaphorical Model in an Islamic Culture. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 21 (1): 89–114.
Turner, Victor 1967 Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Watters, Charles 2001 Emerging Paradigms in the Mental Health Care of Refugees. Social Science and Medicine 52: 1709–1718.
Williams, Holly Ann 1993 Self-Settled Refugees in North-Western Zambia: Shifting Norms of Assistance From Social Networks. In Committee on Refugees and Immigrants: Selected Pa-pers on Refugee Issues, Vol. II. Mary Carol Hopkins and Nancy Donnelly, eds. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association
Young, Allan 1997 Suffering and the Origins of Traumatic Memory. In Social Suffering. A. Kleinman, V. Das, and M. Lock, eds., pp. 245-260. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Coker, E.M. “Traveling Pains”: Embodied Metaphors of Suffering Among Southern Sudanese Refugees in Cairo. Cult Med Psychiatry 28, 15–39 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MEDI.0000018096.95218.f4
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MEDI.0000018096.95218.f4