Symposion. Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences Symposion. Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences
Moreno Paulon
ABSTRACT: On the basis of medical anthropological literature and the feminist critique around Freudian theory of hysteria, we here consider the concepts of embodiment, agency and crisis of presence as guiding principles for a context-sensitive understanding of dysfunctional behaviours as means of communication within the study of symbolic systems. With an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the Dora case is represented next to an ethnographic case where mass hysteria was medically diagnosed over spirit possession seizures in Malay Western factories. We explore the status of dysfunctional behaviours as bodily signs, invested with cultural meanings representing social distress, gender inequality and structural violence. The ideas of Mary Douglas and Kurt Danziger, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Szasz and Ludwig Binswanger are here combined to outline a semiology of behaviours able to account for the phenomenological reality, inside and outside of the clinic, of a social body enacting as living metaphor.
