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Between History and Anthropology: Stigma, the Subaltern and Leprosy in China

An essay review of Leprosy in China: A History, by Angela Ki Che Leung. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009

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Notes

  1. Chakrabarty (2000) coined this term in his historiographies of India.

  2. Kleinman's past research with Lawrence Yang et al. (2008a) has sought to complicate oversimplified scholarly concepts of stigma by bringing lian and mianzi (moral and social “face,” respectively) to bear on cases of schizophrenia and AIDS in contemporary China.

  3. Dr. Olaf Kristen Skinsnes, a missionary leprologist who studied in China, outlined hypothetical characteristics of the world’s quintessential stigmatized disease; these characteristics match up precisely with those of leprosy, reserving for it a special role in stigma theory as the gold standard of stigmatization. Zachary Gussow (1989) explores this role in a Western context but, of course, leaves a “lacuna” to be filled regarding non-Western places like China. In the process of filling that “lacuna,” Leung uncovers stories of patients with this quintessentially stigmatized condition who used stigma to their own advantage, showing that the local context of stigma complicates the tacit assumption that its gold standard must also be the most disempowering of diseases.

  4. For example, see “Stigma of Mental Illness,” where Yang et al. (2008b, p. 219) point out, “From Goffman’s perspective, stigma occurs when a person is characterized by society … in a way that differs from the characteristics that person actually possesses.” Leung’s lepers appropriated those characteristics expected by society for the sake of economic gain, making Goffman’s (1963, pp. 3–4) conceptualization untenable.

  5. As Kleinman describes in a previous essay, “The German social historian Thomas Nipperdey (Nipperdey 1974; Kocka and Nipperdey 1979) has put it this way: the task of the historian and social scholar, he observed during the battle of the historians in Germany a decade ago, is to return to the past the anxiety and uncertainty and danger it held as it was actually lived” (2002, p. 244).

References

  • Chakrabarty Dipesh 2000 Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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  • Goffman Erving 1963 Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. New York:Prentice Hall.

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  • Gussow, Zachary (1989) Leprosy, Racism, and Public Health: Social Policy in Chronic Disease Control. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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  • Kleinman, Arthur 2002 The Moral and the Medical: The Stakes of Social Experience. In Society and Medicine: Essays in Honor of Renée C. Fox. Allen Glicksman, Carla M. Messikomer, and Judith P. Swazey, eds., pp. 243–257. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

  • Kocka, J., and Thomas Nipperdey 1979 Theorie und Erzählung in der Geschichte. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag.

  • Nipperdey, Thomas 1974 Konflikt, einzige Wahrheit der Gesellschaft? Osnabrück: Fromm.

  • Yang, Lawrence H., et al. 2008a ‘Face’ and the Embodiment of Stigma in China: The Cases of Schizophrenia and AIDS. Social Science and Medicine 67: 398–408.

  • Yang, Lawrence H., et al. 2008b Stigma of Mental Illness. In International Encyclopedia of Public Health. 1st ed. Kris Heggenhougen and Stella Quah, eds., pp. 219–230. Burlington, MA: Elsevier.

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  1. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Arthur Kleinman & Grace Ryan

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  1. Arthur Kleinman
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  2. Grace Ryan
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Correspondence to Arthur Kleinman.

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Kleinman, A., Ryan, G. Between History and Anthropology: Stigma, the Subaltern and Leprosy in China. Cult Med Psychiatry 34, 548–552 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-010-9180-0

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