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ミッシェル・デイグル（ハワイ大学／熊本大学文学部客員研究員・熊本大学＜水俣病＞学術資料調査研究推進室室員）の発表タイトルおよび要旨です。
Abstract （要旨） |
This paper explores the practices, power and politics involved in naming methyl mercury poisoning in Japan, and its effects on intersubjective illness experience and pain, both physical and emotional. “Minamata disease” (MD) was first used in 1956 to refer to the discovery of methyl mercury poisoning in Minamata, Kumamoto, Japan. However, prior to and after the poisoning was officially recognized and christened, a variety of different names were also attributed to the most egregious symptoms--ataxia, constriction of the field of vision, numbness around the mouth and in the extremities and violent convulsions. Drawing on ethnographic research, I contend that the name “Minamata disease” indexes a pluralism of tools and dialogues evoked to sustain a coherent, political meta-narrative, while it is simultaneously appropriated in victim circles to contest and reconstruct a people’s narrative at the locus of the name itself. These names serve to localize MD within a specific illness landscape, thus obscuring and serving as form of structural violence against victims within Minamata City and other contamination areas. The dialectics of state power and control commingle with individual narratives of pain and illness experience to constitute a semiotics of pain that transverses social, medical, legal and geographic landscapes.
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