The love-lorn consumptive

South Asian ethnography and the psychosomatic paradigm

Francis Zimmermann

pp. 185-195

in: Beatrix Pfleiderer, Gilles Bibeau (eds), Anthropologies of medicine, Wiesbaden, Vieweg+Teubner, 1991

Abstract

This paper comes within the perspective of symbolical anthropology and semiotics. It heavily relies on religious ethnography in South Asia and Sanskrit textual studies. Its surmise is that some of the most essential concepts of South Asian psychiatry are not to be gained from clinical studies in mental hospitals, but from a careful reading of Sanskrit love stories. The first part is an attempt to characterize this perspective, which challenges the dominant paradigm of North American medical anthropology. The second part of this paper gathers a few scraps of religious ethnography that are relevant to the study of consumption, the wasting away of vital fluids. The third part sets out the Hindu medical concept of consumption as a mal d"amour and places this disease in the context of South Asian culture and society.