AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 45, no. 4 (Fall 2006)

THE EMPTY GESTURE: TOURETTE SYNDROME AND THE SEMANTIC DIMENSION OF ILLNESS

Andrew Buckser
Purdue University

This article, based on fieldwork with people with Tourette Syndrome (TS), explores how problems of cultural classification shape the experience, treatment, and social significance of disease symptoms. TS resists incorporation into the standard con-ceptual frameworks through which Americans understand illness. Its symptoms seem to stand between the psychological and the neurological, between the uncon-trolled physicality of movement disorders and the disordered intentionality of psychiatric conditions. The difficulties of translating these behaviors into a cultural discourse which cannot easily accommodate them amount to semantic symptoms, and are the primary burden of TS for its sufferers. The article considers some of the key conceptual ambiguities involved in TS, the difficulties they present, and some of the methods by which people address them. It argues that a focus on such semantic aspects of illness can provide a fuller understanding of the relationship between culture and illness, which can contribute to the well-being of afflicted persons. (Tourette syndrome, semantic aspects of illness, medical anthropology).

THE PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBALIZATION IN TAIWAN

Yung-mei Tsai
Texas Tech University

Mei-lin Lee
Asia University

Temu Wang
National Chung Cheng University

Accelerated globalization in Taiwan has affected the work, jobs, and lives of people  since the 1970s. Examples reported here are from in-depth interviews with eight principal income earners selected from a sample of 1,000 households during 2000. Among them were more losers than winners. Those hardest hit were people whose work or business was in the informal, traditional economic sectors. (Globalization, Taiwan, personal economic consequences).

EXCHANGE IN BURIATIA: MUTUAL SUPPORT, INDEBTEDNESS, AND KINSHIP

Katherine R. Metzo
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Post-socialist exchange in the Tunka valley of the Buriat Republic, Russia, has a range of economic transactions ambiguously referred to as mutual support. These transactions reproduce social connections and are a form of investment in one's future. Residents of Tunka represent these activities in moral terms, in which kinship is used as a metaphor for the trusted and close social ties that make up social exchange networks. (Buriat Republic, exchange, post-socialist economy, kinship)v

EXPERIMENTAL-FORMAL ANALYSIS OF KINSHIP

Murray J. Leaf
University of Texas, Dallas

The experimental method, in its most important sense, is a prescription for conducting a system of experiments, each answering questions raised by others until the analysis seems complete. I previously published an experimental method for the field elicitation of kinship terminologies, but did not demonstrate the chain of experimental procedures by which the elicitation and final results are connected. These analyses show the logical structure of kinship terminologies and how kinship systems are built on them. This article describes that chain and those developed by colleagues that deepen the analysis. It is the most complete and accurate account of the field data of kinship. It applies equally well to other cultural systems, and in showing the fundamental conceptual structures of kinship, it allows us to see how the power of conceptual systems like kinship rest in the rational basis of culture and, conversely, the cultural basis of rationality. (Experiment, kinship analysis, formal analysis, reciprocity, self-other).