The understanding of experienced pain has recently moved from the biological to the metaphorical. Detailed interviews with
             twelve Turkish and Kurdish patients in London who had been unsuccessfully investigated medically for chronic pain showed that
             their understanding reflected local, typically humoural, conceptions of self and body. However there was little to suggest
             interpretation of the illness as a more specific and grounded idiom for social or political experience. It is suggested that the current
             vogue for 'interpretation' in medical anthropology and social psychiatry may occasionally be, as Umberto Eco puts it,
             INTRODUCTION
             It is common in cultural and historical theorising to attribute changing social patterns to some 'deeper' transformation of self or
             society, such that fashionable hemlines or illnesses represent changing class relations, gender roles, social crises, or whatever
             (Littlewood, 1997). At its most sophisticated, this logic presumes an affinity between a wider social patterning and its individual
             cultural manifestation as an illness (eg. Kenny, 1980); sicknesses are taken as characteristic of their age or of shared social
             What actually constitutes a plausible interpretation of this sort is none too clear, and historians and social scientists rely on a
             number of rather different procedures (Littlewood, 1997): an identified similarity between illness experience and the presumed
             state of other individuals undergoing the same social experiences (the illness as a reified exaggeration of the everyday), a formal
             equivalence between an individual and the society which experiences change (the individual as an analogue of the body politic), an
             expressed interpretation given by the sick individual themselves (local motivation or exegesis) or a more tenuous connection
             ...