ABSTRACT Health complaints in Bangladesh will be studied in order to understand what they accomplish and how they help constitute Bengali personhood. Methods will include: 1) participant- observation in homes and medical settings in a small town, and 2) recording of complaints to be submitted to 3) ethnographic discourse analysis. Discourse analysis will focus on the form and function of the complaints as speech acts. Off-record goals of these acts will be explored through conversation-internal indications and in interviews (with participants and others). Defining characteristics of "health complaints" will be described. Parameters of variation to be explored include gender and relative age of speakers and hearers and the nature of the speech setting (home versus medical). Analysis will produce taxonomic, pragmatic, and cultural-symbolic models for the understanding of complaints in their contexts. Because complaints-- particularly by females-- may themselves be viewed as selfish actions by Bengalis (particularly males), models will relate complaints to ideals and actualities of self-other boundaries, much discussed in South Asian ethnography. Psychological and medical anthropologists in South Asia have considered whether somatic symptoms can be considered indirect expressions of social or psychological distress; the research will uncover linguistic and other behavioral evidence relevant to this question.
