Metaphor and the Representations of Health and Illness among the Semai Indigenous Community in Malaysia

Lisbeth Sinan Lendik,Sumathi Renganathan,Mei Yuit Chan,Ngee Thai Yap

doi:10.17576/gema-2017-1704-05

Abstract

Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, illness and wellbeing. Understanding the cultural representation of health and illness of particular communities becomes urgent especially when the community concerned is underserved in healthcare. In this project, we sought to examine the representations of health and illness by members of the Semai indigenous community through the use of metaphor analysis, a qualitative method in applied linguistics that attend to how people use language in real-world discourses to understand their conceptualisations of abstract ideas and emotions. From semi-structured interviews with the indigenous Semai people in a village in Malaysia, metaphors of health and illness were identified from the oral stories told by participants. Metaphors were identified and analysed following Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory that explains how people understand one idea in a conceptual domain through accessing resources in another conceptual domain. The results show that universal metaphors are dominant in representing embodied experiences while culturally influenced metaphors are important as vehicles of expression derived from their environment and folk beliefs. We argue that while culturally influenced metaphors may mark the participants as strange in their ways of thinking, a closer look at their underlying frameworks finds that they connect with universal bases that are intrinsic to all human experience. Understanding conceptual metaphors can contribute to the expansion of the locus of shared understanding between healthcare providers and the communities they serve.

Highlights

Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, illness and wellbeing, ranging from examining individuals’ underlying representations of illness to addressing larger sociocultural factors that affect the individual as part of a social network in his or her community
Attempts to understand the representations of health and illness of particular communities become urgent especially when the community concerned is underserved in healthcare, and there exists health inequality between them and other adjacent communities
We sought to examine the representations of health and illness by members of the Semai indigenous community through the use of metaphor analysis, a method in applied linguistics that attend to how people use language in real-world discourses to understand their conceptualisations of abstract ideas and emotions

Summary

Introduction

Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, illness and wellbeing, ranging from examining individuals’ underlying representations of illness to addressing larger sociocultural factors that affect the individual as part of a social network in his or her community (see Uskull, 2010, for an overview). Researchers have sought to show the differences in the experience of and reaction to illness by people from different cultural backgrounds. They argue that differences in the perception of health and illness affect how patients experience the symptoms of diseases and what actions they take to alleviate their suffering, including seeking healthcare. Indigenous communities in Malaysia comprise ethnic groups that are not very wellunderstood as they live in locations removed from other communities Their economic, education and health status is far below that of the general population (Bedford, 2013; Zainal, 2003), this making the indigenous people a marginalised minority in the country.This project involves the Semai community in Malaysia, an indigenous ethnic group living in the central region of the Malaysian peninsula

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Conclusion