Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh

This is a study of the complaints of medical patients in rural Bangladesh, and how those complaints are connected to and reveal the patient's social world, social relations, sense of self, ideology of language and his/her relation to power. The book also focuses on the current troubles besetting genres of complaint in Bangladesh. Wilce provides the first ethnography of Bangla communication, the first semiotically-oriented book on greater Bengal, and the first attempt to apply critical medical anthropology to Bangladesh.