Wounded warriors: Further explorations into a biocultural semiotics
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Kathryn Staiano-Ross
Her research interests are medical semiotics, biosemiotics, medical anthropology, and the ethnic groups of Southern Belize. Her publications include
Interpreting Signs of Illness: A Case Study in Medical Semiotics (1986); ‘Biosemiotics, Ethnographically Speaking’ (1992); ‘Body of signs: An introduction to biocultural semiotics’ (with Sunil Khanna, 1999); and ‘Losing myself: Body as icon/body as object(s)’ (2005).
Abstract
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Within five days, forty-one countries began deploying troops to Saudia Arabia in a buildup of mass manpower and weaponry. On the morning of January 16, 1991, Coalition troops began intensive air strikes. On February 24, 1991, the ground war began. It lasted a mere one hundred hours. There were 148 combat deaths among Coalition troops. Troops were home by June. It had been by all accounts the ‘perfect war.’ A few months later, Coalition troops began to complain of strange symptoms. Within a year of the soldiers return, the press had created a disease which as yet had no ‘biomarkers’ and an unbounded set of symptoms. They called it Gulf War Syndrome. I write here about a process whereby a new ‘disease’ was created and two competing etiologies battled for primacy for the right to explain the nature and cause of this mystery ‘illness.’ This is about differing methods of seeing inside the body and the ways in which knowledge about disorder is produced.
About the author
Her research interests are medical semiotics, biosemiotics, medical anthropology, and the ethnic groups of Southern Belize. Her publications include Interpreting Signs of Illness: A Case Study in Medical Semiotics (1986); ‘Biosemiotics, Ethnographically Speaking’ (1992); ‘Body of signs: An introduction to biocultural semiotics’ (with Sunil Khanna, 1999); and ‘Losing myself: Body as icon/body as object(s)’ (2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Wounded warriors: Further explorations into a biocultural semiotics
- ‘Reloading’ movies into commercial reality: A multimodal analysis of The Matrix trilogy's promotional posters
- The use of language to create realities: The example of Good Bye, Lenin!
- The narrative semiotics of The Daily Show
- Le produit in situ : Analyse (sémiotique) d'une photographie d'Andreas Gursky 99 cent
- Semiotic systemity of visual artworks: Case study of The Holy Trinity by Rublev
- ‘What's in a picture?’ A comparison of drawings by apes and children
- ‘Aller sans mais se sentir avec’ : emplois absolus non-innocents de avec et sans
- An interview with Paul Newman
- ‘Superreader’: Riffaterre revisited
- Application d'une hypothèse de linguistique textuelle : Le génotexte
- Information, semiotics, and symbolic systems
- Assuming positions: Organizational change as mediated through metaphors
- Icon, index, symbol and denotation, connotation, metasign
- Toxic substances, semiotic forms: Towards a socio- and textual analysis of altered senses
- Playing doubles: Derrida's writing
- Paratextology
- Semiotics of space: Peirce and Lefebvre
- Gesture and language
Articles in the same Issue
- Wounded warriors: Further explorations into a biocultural semiotics
- ‘Reloading’ movies into commercial reality: A multimodal analysis of The Matrix trilogy's promotional posters
- The use of language to create realities: The example of Good Bye, Lenin!
- The narrative semiotics of The Daily Show
- Le produit in situ : Analyse (sémiotique) d'une photographie d'Andreas Gursky 99 cent
- Semiotic systemity of visual artworks: Case study of The Holy Trinity by Rublev
- ‘What's in a picture?’ A comparison of drawings by apes and children
- ‘Aller sans mais se sentir avec’ : emplois absolus non-innocents de avec et sans
- An interview with Paul Newman
- ‘Superreader’: Riffaterre revisited
- Application d'une hypothèse de linguistique textuelle : Le génotexte
- Information, semiotics, and symbolic systems
- Assuming positions: Organizational change as mediated through metaphors
- Icon, index, symbol and denotation, connotation, metasign
- Toxic substances, semiotic forms: Towards a socio- and textual analysis of altered senses
- Playing doubles: Derrida's writing
- Paratextology
- Semiotics of space: Peirce and Lefebvre
- Gesture and language
