Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, 21)

eloquence In Trouble Captures The Articulation Of Several Troubled Lives In Bangladesh As Well As The Threats To The Very Genres Of Their Expression, Lament In Particular. The First Ethnography Of One Of The Most Spoken Mother Tongues On Earth, Bangla, This Study Represents A New Approach To Troubles Talk, Combining The Rigor Of Discourse Analysis With The Interpretive Depth Of Psychological Anthropology. Its Careful Transcriptions Of Bangladeshi Troubles Talk Will Disturb Some Readers And Move Others—beyond Past Academic Discussion Of Personhood In South Asia. This book captures the articulation of several troubled lives in Bangladesh as well as the threats to the very genres of their expression, Lament in particular. The first ethnography of one of the most spoken mother tongues on earth, Bangla, this study represents a new approach to troubles talk, combining the rigor of discourse analysis with the interpretive depth of psychological anthropology. James M. Wilce's study of the complaints of medical patients in rural Bangladesh reveals the patient's social world, social relations, sense of self, ideology of language and his or her relation to power "Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain," or so says comedienne Lily Tomlin (quoted in Pinker 1994: 32; emphasis added).