''I can't tell you all my troubles'': Conflict, resistance, and metacommunication in Bangladeshi illness interactions

Transcripts of interactions between patients, kin, and healers open up the lives of four rogi (''sick ones'' or ''patients'') in Matlab, Bangladesh. I compare the pattern of domination and resistance in those interactions with Western biomedical encounters. Patients in Matlab express dissatisfaction with the power relations of family or medicine through low-level means that do not enter discursive consciousness. By indirectly calling attention to the suppression of their voices, patients' metacomplaints-a species of metacommunication evident in two of the interactions-entail an incipient cultural criticism.