The Register of “Complaint”:

Abstract

In the language of the medical file, "complaint" refers to the symptoms and ailments reported by the patient. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2007 in the mental healthcare setting in South India to argue that the typology of "complaint" and the dialogic exchanges involved in its production mark a far wider catchment area for the allegations and grievances that circulate between patient, kin, clinician, and observing anthropologist. I propose the notion of the register of complaint as a hermeneutic for grappling with the emotionally charged, interactional processes of accusation, arbitration, and reportage that drive clinical modes of inquiry and evaluation in the South Indian mental health encounter. Ethnographic case studies suggest that grievance and accusation command both a vital directive force and evidentiary role in the social, moral, and emotional work of psychiatric diagnosis. [complaint, diagnosis, kinship and family, emotion,

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“…Though medical anthropology has long considered the experience and management of illness (Janzen 1978;Kleinman 1988), its complex relationship with biomedical categories often guides it to tensions springing from biomedicine's uncertainties. Its gaze often rests on biomedical ambiguities like mental illness, pain, and chronic disease (Chau 2012;Dickson-Gomez 2002;Dressler et al 1998;Singer et al 1988). These texts focus on the telling of symptoms as narrative and subjectivities or claims that emerge in recounting disease's characteristics, experience, and progression (Good 1994;Mattingly 1998).…”

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