climate; and a variety of specifically named diseases. These causes clearly indicate a wide set of feelings and social situations associated with heart distress. By tracing the semantic links between the elements of this array, semantic fields that are associated with clusters of experience and with more basic structural elements of the society emerge from a long list of causes.
The two most important fields of symbols and experience which emerge may be called 'the problematics of female sexuality' and 'the oppression of daily life'. These two semantic fields are outlined in Figures 2 and 3 and are described in the following several pages. They were developed by noting first the semantic links between causes given for heart distress (Figure 1), then the common associations which extend the meaning of the linked terms. (For example, the contraceptive pill is said to make a woman appear old , and both are associated with infertility.) Such associative links are taken from informants' statements, complaints of symptoms, or explanatory models from popular medicine, and are joined together in the semantic networks outlined.