THE EMPTY GESTURE: TOURETTE SYNDROME AND THE SEMANTIC DIMENSION OF ILLNESS.

This article, based on fieldwork with people with Tourette Syndrome (TS), explores how problems of cultural classification shape the experience, treatment, and social significance of disease symptoms. TS resists incorporation into the standard conceptual frameworks through which Americans understand illness. Its symptoms seem to stand between the psychological and the neurological, between the uncontrolled physicality of movement disorders and the disordered intentionality of psychiatric conditions. The difficulties of translating these behaviors into a cultural discourse which cannot easily accommodate them amount to semantic symptoms, and are the primary burden of TS for its sufferers. The article considers some of the key conceptual ambiguities involved in TS, the difficulties they present, and some of the methods by which people address them. It argues that a focus on such semantic aspects of illness can provide a fuller understanding of the relationship between culture and illness, which can contribute to the well-being of afflicted persons. (Tourette Syndrome, semantic aspects of illness, medical anthropology) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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