Metaphor and the representations of health and illness among the Semai indigenous community in Malaysia
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 t...
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Main Authors: | , , , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2017
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Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/11769/1/18741-63574-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/11769/ http://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1043 |
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Summary: | 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. |
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