Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that a peircean phenomenological analysis offers an analytical bridge between patients own internal struggle to make sense of bodily distress and the social and cultural setting within which this struggle takes place, which is currently lacking in the field of medical anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Medically unexplained conditions have long been a playground of the culture determinists of social sciences, who have tried to unravel how patients with multiple and disturbing bodily sensations come to cast their illnesses in the language of a diagnosis as e.g. Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. The main arguments have been, either that people are so influenced by their social peers and that they simply swap symptoms or 'absorb them' when they encounter them in the TV, or that the patient play a passive role in the disgnostic process and take on what ever label the medical experts gives them. The "real" reason for their bodily distress is often explained as transference of something denied - here psychological distress - into something less stigmatised and culturally accepted - here physical symptoms. The main problem with these kind of explanations is, that they neglect people's own bodily experiences and cast as invalid the knowledge people have during their lives accumulated about themselves. Another problem is that these explanations do not bring us any closer to an empirically grounded understanding of the relation of individual conceptualization of bodily distress to the social and cultural context.

This paper argues that a peircean phenomenological and semiotic analysis of the person's own version of the diagnostic process offers this brigde between the individual internal struggle to make sense of a diffuse condition, and the social and cultural setting within which this struggle takes place. The paper builds on interivews with self-diagnosed sufferers of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.