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In this article, I honor Jerome Bruner's meaning-centered and person-centered approach to the study of cultural psychology by describing aspects of the cultural psychology of suffering in and around a Hindu temple town in Orissa, India. I also outline the "big three" explanations of illness (biomedical, interpersonal, and moral) on a worldwide scale and recount some of the many meanings associated with the word health, as in the English language survey question "How would you rate your overall health?" [cultural psychology; explanations of illness; meanings of health; Orissa, India]
Jerome Bruner is famous for his meaning-centered and person-centered approach to the study of cultural psychology (see, e.g., Bruner 1986, 1990, 1993). In this article, I seek to honor the life and work of my former teacher with a thickly substantive (and partly analytic) article on the many meanings of health for people in Orissa, India, where I started conducting research on cultural psychology while still a student taking courses with Jerome Bruner at Harvard University during the late 1960s.
Before fully engaging my topic-the cultural psychology of suffering-allow me to glance back a few decades and share a pleasurable memory. At Harvard University in the late 1960s, the Department of Social Relations (where I was a student in the "Social Anthropology Wing") and the Department of Psychology (where Jerry Bruner was a faculty member and the director of the "Center for Cognitive Studies") were located in the vertically and intellectually segmented white towering structure, William James Hall. One is tempted, while thinking back on those glorious days and on that strange setting, to write an article entitled "William James, Floor by Floor." If you were looking for personality and clinical psychology (in those days, Henry Murray, Eric Erikson, David McClelland) you pressed the number 15 elevator button. Talcott Parsons and his sociological theory were located on floor 3. Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting, Evon Vogt, Cora DuBois, the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), and much of cultural anthropology could be found on the fourth floor. Each floor felt like its own intellectual world. I lived on Floor 4, but every once in a while I would enter the elevator and press 11; and with great anticipation and excitement I would enter the world...