introduction 37
sound (distinguished from harder “sh” which is transcribed as “sh”). Th us, rather
than use, for example, an apostrophe as required by the Romanization Tables to
indicate a letter that resembles the English “y” sound, I use a “y” (for example,
chaitanyam rather than caitan’am.), and I use “n” rather than “n” with additional
markings to indicate dental and retrofl ex versions of consonants that resemble
the English “n.”
Th e system I use closely resembles methods of transliteration employed in
Kerala in English-language newspapers, advertising and signage where most of
the text is in English and occasional Malayalam terms are rendered in Roman
letters. I feel this will make the text more readable for those who are not experts
in Malayalam but may know other Indian languages—although it may disap-
point linguists. Tamil speakers, for instance, should easily be able to spot cognates
they are familiar with, while Malayalam speakers should recognize which form
of a letter is used by its context. Th is system also has the advantage of making
it possible to render Malayalam terms as well as Sanskrit words, which occur in
discussions of ayurveda in the text, using the same system of diacritics. Juggling
two systems of transliteration would make the text less readable and occasionally
confusing.- In this study, I use variations on Nichter’s 1981 phrase “idioms of distress” (for
example, “illness idioms,” “idioms for expressing distress”) to refer to the various
forms in which illness or suff ering can be expressed. Th is term has the virtue of
not specifying problems as illness or disease but instead pointing to the more
basic distress that characterizes psychopathology, family problems, possession
and other, indeterminate forms of suff ering. I also adopt Kleinman, Das and
Lock’s (1997) focus on suff ering because it emphasizes a fundamental feature of
problems I am examining without medicalizing them. For example, rather than
referring to spirit possession as a mental illness or a symptom of such illness, I
consider both possession and mental illness to be idioms of distress or problems
of social, psychological and spiritual suff ering. - Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987), Csordas
(1990, 1994, 1999), Strathern (1996). - Kleinman (1980) and Marsella and White (1982) represent examples of this
orientation. - Kleinman in his work on depression and the expression of pain in China informs
us that, around the world, somatization is a more common form of expressing
distress than psychologization and is particularly found in non-Western societ-
ies: “Psychologization is the result of the Western mode of modernization that
now infl uences the elite of non-Western societies; somatization is the product
of more traditional cultural orientations worldwide, including that of the more
rural, the poorer, and the less-educated in the West” (1986: 56). Psychologization,
Kleinman claims, is a phenomenon of the middle- and upper-class Western
world that emerged after World War I (55–56).
Although anthropologists and other researchers do not usually explicitly
say that all non-Western peoples are somehow more embodied, when one looks
at the corpus of research on the body one gets the impression that people outside
the West are more likely to ground experience in the body or that their experience
transcends mind-body dualism. Frustrated by biomedicine’s need to see all suff er-
ing as “either wholly organic or wholly psychological in origin,” Scheper-Hughes
and Lock propose that medical anthropologists try to transcend the assumptions