Metaphor as illness: Postmodern dilemmas in the representation of body, mind and disorder

Abstract

The search for a synthesis bridging the gap between materialist and idealist approaches in anthropological theory has been invigorated by recent efforts to develop a critical medical anthropology. Not limited to integrating class analysis and cultural interpretation, the “mindful body” paradigm also aims at empowering the ill, whose experience is denied by biomedical and psychiatric categories that locate disease either in the body or in the mind, and treat them separately from one another and independently of social context. However, missing from the “mindful body” discourse is a reflexive awareness of its contextual grounding in both popular and biomedical discourses of illness, with which it exchanges meanings and from which it borrows dominating power. The case of cancer as a metaphorized illness and a pathologized trope is used to illustrate this process.