THE PRAGMATICS OF MADNESS - PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF A BANGLADESHI WOMANS ABERRANT LAMENT

A fine-grained analysis of the transcript of a Bangladeshi woman's lam ent is used to argue for an anthropology of ''madness'' that attends c losely to performance and performativity. The emergent, interactive pr oduction of wept speech, together with the conflicting use to which it is put by the performer and her relatives, is linked problematically to performance genres and to ethnopsychiatric indexes of madness. Tune ful weeping is taken by relatives to be performative of madness, in a sense something like Austin's. Yet, exploration of the divergent lingu istic ideologies which are brought to bear on the lament not only enab les more nuanced ethnographic treatment but also has reflexive ramific ations for medical and psychological anthropology. This leads to a cri tique of the referentialism in our own treatment of language. The role played by transparent reference is overshadowed by indexicality and b y dialogical processes of proposing and resisting labels for speech ge nres attributed to the ''mad.''.