Complaining means very different things between friends and in doctors' offices. When doctors speak of patients' "complaints," they have in mind the patients' presentation of signs useful in diagnosing disease; biomedicine focuses, in a narrowly reductive way, on "complaints" as those signs and disease categories. Conversation analysts writing about complaining in everyday social interaction call it "troubles talk," but fail to shed light on the person with the troubles. In Eloquence in Trouble the author listens to troubles talk in Bangladesh- off-hand complaints, illness narratives at home or before practitioners, and the poetic and musical genre of lament called bilap- so as to capture its relation to the troubles teller's lifeworld, social relations, sense of self, ideology of language, and his or her position in relations of power. But the book also explores the troubles besetting the very genres of complaint in the late '90's in Bangladesh. Bilap, in particular, runs counter to the modernist rationality of reformist Islam. Because of their gender, class, or condition (e.g. paglami, "madness"), the troubles tellers represented herein are often silenced by those around them. Yet their speech performances- their conversational complaints as well as laments- are their way of resisting silencing or interruption as well as illness, death, or their overall life-situation.

This is the first ethnography of Bangla communication, the first semiotically oriented book on any part of greater Bengal, and the first attempt to apply critical medical anthropology to Bangladesh. It also engages the issues that have captivated recent generations of ethnographers working in South Asia, particularly South Asian and constructions of personhood and of everyday resistance. These transcripts of Bangladeshi troubles talk will disturb some and move many readers- beyond polarizing comparisons of South Asian vs. Western selfhood and society to empathy.