Islam M Saiful
a Department of Sociology and Anthropology , University Brunei Darussalam , Brunei.
Med Anthropol. 2014;33(5):441-56. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2014.883620.
This article draws on ethnographic data from rural Bangladesh to examine how community members affected by arsenicosis understand, explain, and experience this deadly illness. Biomedically, arsenicosis has been described as a disease caused by drinking arsenic-contaminated water, and it is manifested through physiological complications such as symmetric hyperkeratosis of the palms and soles, cancer of the skin, kidney and lungs, and diseases of the blood vessels. This article goes beyond such biomedical discourse and illustrates how arsenicosis has been vernacularized as ghaa in practice. It focuses on lay world views, logic, local knowledge systems, and sociocultural factors that shape popular understandings of the disease. This article is thus a contribution to our understanding of how arsenicosis, apart from its biomedical and clinical manifestations, is understood and experienced by affected individuals living within the particular sociocultural and ecological constraints of rural Bangladesh.
本文借鉴了孟加拉国农村的人种志数据，以研究受砷中毒影响的社区成员如何理解、解释和体验这种致命疾病。从生物医学角度来看，砷中毒被描述为一种因饮用受砷污染的水而引发的疾病，其表现为诸如手掌和脚底对称性角化过度、皮肤癌、肾癌和肺癌以及血管疾病等生理并发症。本文超越了这种生物医学论述，阐明了砷中毒在实际中是如何被通俗化为ghaa的。它聚焦于普通民众的世界观、逻辑、当地知识体系以及塑造人们对该疾病普遍认知的社会文化因素。因此，本文有助于我们理解在孟加拉国农村特定的社会文化和生态限制下，受影响个体除了从生物医学和临床角度理解和体验砷中毒之外，还有其他的方式。
