Cult Med Psychiatry. 1990 Jun; 14(2): 255-73.

Boundaries inside the body: women's sufferings in southern peasant Italy.

Pandolfi M.

Department of Glottoanthropological Studies, University of Rome, La Sapienza, Italy.

In a village of Southern Italy the secret world of women's emotions is fundamentally expressed through the body. The female body is open to events of the world and absorbs and feels their effect and defines a new identity, a minimal one. This gives rise to a symbolic anatomy, pathology, and physiology that serve to distinguish male and female worlds and to bridge inner and outer experience. These "traces" of external and extraordinary events, which in the past and in daily life have cut the secret and emotional world of women, are inscribed on the body. This body becomes a phenomenological memoir that opens a new way of interpreting distress and suffering and illness. This article represents a bridge from the interpretation of suffering and illness in Southern Italy via Gramsci and De Martino to a metacultural process of creating a polysemic and multilevel sense of self.