Robert Pool - Dialogue and the Interpretation of Illness

A University College London Series

Series Editors: Barbara Bender, John Gledhill and Bruce Kapferer

First published 1994 by Berg Publishers

Published 2020 by Routledge

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Robert Pool 1994

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Pool, Robert

Dialogue and the Interpretation of

Illness: Conversations in a Cameroon

Village.- (Explorations in Anthropology

Series)

I.Title II.Series

306.4

ISBN 13: 978-0-8549-6873-2 (hbk)

In announcing the death of the Author, Roland Barthes claimed that the text is nothing but a tissue of quotations; the writer, never original, can only mix and imitate other writings. The author does not exist prior to the text, but is bom simultaneously with it. The text only finds unity in its reading.

To a certain extent this is true of the present text. It is a product of my readings of other texts, be they the published texts of other anthropologists, the transcriptions of interviews and conversations from the field, or the spoken discourse of everyday life. Following convention, I will attempt to name the authors of some of these texts.

There are those whom I have never met but whose writings have inspired me: Dennis Tedlock, Michelle Rosaldo, Kevin Dwyer, Stephen Tyler, Paul Friedrich, Clifford Geertz, Richard Bernstein. And there are those who have inspired me both through their work and through personal acquaintance: Bob Scholte, whose untimely death deprived me of an inspiring teacher and friend, and Johannes Fabian, who supervised an earlier version of this book as a dissertation. When it comes to supervising Ph.D. students Johanness philosophy is you either sink or you swim. Individual tutoring sessions were few and far between, but he read my manuscript thoroughly (it was sometimes quite shocking how thoroughly) and wrote his comments in the margin, or announced them tersely while looking down at me from behind his pipe. But there was also dialogue. In his Tuesday afternoon anthropology seminar at the University of Amsterdam he aired his ideas and reported on work in progress. More importantly, through his maieutic method, he prompted, even forced us to develop and formulate our own ideas, often seeming to assume that we already knew, and that his task was simply to make us aware of this by patiently drawing out our knowledge. His Socratic approach, initially baffling in an academic context still largely dominated by a monological tradition in which knowledge in assumed to be transferred in a one-way process and facts discovered through the application of the proper methodology, has been perhaps my greatest inspiration.

Then there are those in the village of Tabenken who welcomed me in their midst as a guest and a friend and shared their lives with me, and on whose discourse this ethnography largely rests, both those who appear in these pages: Lawrence Banyong, Fai Nga Kontar, Fai Gabriel, Susan and Mathias Tomla, Fred Ngiri, Simon Ngengeh, Pa TaKwi and Pius Kwison, Tobias Ngwang, Pa Andrew Nfor, Francis Kongor, Father Robert Tanto, Pa Manasas Yangsi, Freda Malah; and those who do not appear, though they were no less important: Pa Tanto Ngeh, Yingkvu Cletus Ndamsa and many others.

David Zeitlins suggestions and comments have contributed to improvements in the later stages of revision and rewriting, and Piet van Reenen and Margo Fransen provided invaluable assistance with the Limbum.

Texts are not born only of other texts, though, they are also shaped by the circumstances of their production. The fieldwork on which this ethnography is based was made possible by various persons and institutions. Professors Mathieu Schoffeleers and Jane Kusin supported my grant application, the Netherlands Organisation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) financed the project generously (grant no. W52-370) and Ren van Kessel at WOTRO ensured that my interactions with the bureaucratic apparatus proceeded smoothly and efficiently. In Cameroon the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MESRES) granted permission for the research and a special word of thanks is due to Dr Paul Nchoji Nkwi.