experiencing the world from body to ĀTMAN 141
ethnic groups and that some have associated expressing suff ering through the
body with low socioeconomic position, one gets the impression that it is people
who have less access to power that locate experience more fi rmly in the body
or transcend mind-body dualism.^2 In particular, distress that is expressed in the
form of emotional or mental problems in the Western middle class world is
allegedly expressed through physical, somatic symptoms elsewhere.^3 In contrast
to these studies, the examples of supra-somatic expressions—concerns about
consciousness and the less tangible parts of the person—I observed in Kerala
cut across class, gender and religious lines.
Th ose who focus on social suff ering (Kleinman and Kleinman 1995;
Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997) and personhood (Pollock 1996) off er the
potential for analyses of experience that do not overindulge the body and
consider a diversity of experiential conditions. Social suff ering includes the
notion of illness, but is broader, taking into account the mental, bodily and
indeterminate other expressions of distress that stem from social pressure
ranging from stress to “nerves” to political violence. Also, particular ethnog-
raphies, such as Robert Desjarlais’ (1997) depiction of the lives of the homeless
in Boston and Lawrence Cohen’s (1998) analysis of aging in India, investi-
gate embodiment and experience without falling into the mentally-oriented
Westerner-embodied Other dichotomy. Desjarlais’ defi nition of experience as
“a historically and culturally constituted process predicated on certain ways of
being in the world” (1997:13) resembles my characterization of local phenom-
enologies. We need to understand that the person and her engagement with
the world are defi ned not by dichotomies but by fi ne-tuned, localized orienta-
tions to experience.
Johnathan Parry (1989) explains that his ethnographic material on the dis-
pensation of the body at death in Banaras, in north India, and informants’
explanations of the conditions of birth and rebirth show a monistic relation
between body, mind and soul—that the food one consumes and one’s thoughts
can alter one’s body and bio-moral substance and that the state of the body
reveals the state of the soul. Parry claims his material also reveals evidence of a
dualism of matter and spirit: that mind is more important than body for salva-
tion (512). Parry suggests one could interpret these explanations as exhibiting
characteristics of both monism and dualism regarding matters of material and
spirit. In other words, material substance and spirit are both integrated and
yet distinct. Th e phenomenological orientations revealed by patients in Kerala
also feature this apparent contradiction. Th ey distinguish substance from spirit
while also demonstrating awareness of mutual permutations of mind, body and
other realms. However, Kerala phenomenology is not dualistic in the same way
Western mind-body dualism is. As a continuum of states, it is not centered