volution has written itself into the bodily experiences of individuals (Kleinman, 1994, p. 707). When the Kleinmans' use a conjoined medical and anthropological analysis of illnesses such as headache, fatigue and dizziness, they discerned that these symptoms surfaced as a result of the political turmoil from 1966 to 1977 (Kleinman, 1994, p. 709). Traditional medicine was able to uncover the links between social and bodily experience. All of the stress resulting from the Chinese Cultural Revolution was manifested in these symptoms of headache, fatigue and dizziness. The Kleinman's medical and anthropological review of Chinese patients provided this breakthrough insight. Their interdisciplinary approach highlighted that the suffering of the above mentioned symptoms offered the patients an opportunity to recall the trauma which the state's official version of history had suppressed (Kleinman, 1994, p. 713). In this case, illness was induced by political chaos. A strictly medical analysis would not have reviewed this possibility.
Before an understanding of how alternative healing can be seen functioning as a critique of western medicine, there must first be more attention given to how the body itself is used as a barometer of cultural value. In their analysis of the Cultural Revolution's effect on Chinese patients, the Kleinmans cite that Pierre Bourdieu and other social theorists insist upon the connection between corporeal and social. Yet in their interest in tracing the relationship between the social and the symbolic, these same social theorists neglect how this correlation impacts the individual (Kleinman, 1994, p. 710). They recall that Sigmund Freud himself hit an impasse when he tried to theorize how the symbolic become the somatic. The conversion between the imaginary into the physical could not be precisely described by either psychoanalytic theory or research (Kleinman, 1994, p. 711). The relationship between the b...