Mark Nichter - Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Ethnomedicine

Edited by

Mark Nichter

University of Arizona Tucson, USA

First published 1992 by Gordon and Breach Science Publishers S.A.

Published 2021 by CRC Press

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1992 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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ISBN 13: 978-2-88124-530-5 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-2-88124-529-9 (pbk)

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Some of the essays in this book were first published in Volume 13, Numbers 1-2 of the journal Medical Anthropology.

Cover: Mud offerings to the god Shiva at the Suriya Temple near Ujire, South Kanara District, Karnataka, India. Offerings represent vows fulfilled in contexts of uncertainty. Boons include regained health, fertility, completed house construction, crop abundance, and business success.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anthropological approaches to the study of ethnomedicine / edited by Mark Nichter.

p.cm.

an expanded collection of essays originally organized for a special edition of the journal Medical anthropology, volume 13 (1-2) 1991Pref.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Folk medicine. 2. Medical anthropology. I. Nichter, Mark.
GR880.A8 1990

Robert Anderson

Susan C. Weller, Trenton K. Ruebush II and Robert E. Klein

Bonnie Glass-Coffin

Paul E. Brodwin

Charles W. Nuckolls

E.J. Sobo

Christopher C. Taylor

Vincanne Adams

Carol Laderman

Margaret Trawick

Mark Nichter

This book consists of an expanded collection of essays on ethnomedicine originally organized for a special edition of the journal Medical Anthropology [Volume 13 (12) 1991]. The collection represents a broad range of research illustrating contemporary trends in the anthropological study of ethnomedicine which span positivist, interpretive and critical theory, as well as postmodern concerns and approaches. The objective of this volume is to broaden appreciation of ethnomedicine as a multidimensional subject of inquiry contributing to and benefiting from contemporary anthropological theory and methods. It is the hope of the contributors that the collection will raise questions which inspire future research endeavors. Each of the research approaches represented has a contribution to make to ethnomedical scholarship. Consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of multiple approaches ensures against theoretical closure and opens the way to productive dialogue.

By M. Nichter

Ten essays and a critical commentary highlighting major themes and suggesting avenues of further investigation comprise this collection. The essays draw upon ethnographic research in Central and South America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. Individual essays discuss the importance of systematically collecting data on measures of healing efficacy, the prevalence of folk illnesses, and the distribution of knowledge about illness attributes; the negotiation and instantiation of illness identities; the power of discourse to produce as well as cure affliction; metamedical discourse as moral commentary; linkages between medico-religious institutions, models of self, power, and the state; and the relationship between ethnomedical research and anthropological studies of the body, gender relations, self, and Other. The essays are divided into four sections focusing on (1) epidemiological approaches to the study of ethnomedicine; (2) discursive practices in the context of healing; (3) the body, state, and production of medico-religious knowledge; and (4) illness as metaphor as well as vehicle for self expression.1

Before presenting these ten essays, I would like to address two fundamental issues influencing the current state of ethnomedical scholarship. The first relates to the scope of ethnomedical studies and the second to the construction of Other as it influences the presentation of ethnomedical data.2

Ethnomedical inquiry is multidimensional and metamedical. It is based on the interpretation of bodily experience as well as the embodiment of ideology, discourse as well as disease, accommodation as well as resistance, and healing as well as curing. Juxtaposed to medical anthropology which often has an applied agenda, ethnomedical inquiry is less guided by pragmatic interests such as the transfer of knowledge or the evaluation of health-related behavior in terms of public health criteria. Ethnomedicine, as the organizing theme for this volume, is broadly conceived. It entails a study of the full range and distribution of health related experience, discourse, knowledge, and practice among different strata of a population; the situated meaning the aforementioned has for peoples at a given historical juncture; transformations in popular health culture and medical systems concordant with social change; and the social relations of health related ideas, behaviors, and practices.

All too often, ethnomedicine is simplistically compartmentalized as a subfield of medical anthropology, delimited to the study of folk illnesses, traditional medical systems, herbal remedies, and healing rituals.3 While these subjects are central to ethnomedicine, they are points of departure, not the focus of a fixed gaze. Ethnomedicine is not limited to the study of medical traditions. It is more than the rarified or privileged study of the spectacular or the quintessential, be this in the form of exotic healing rituals, surgical procedures, or cultural bound syndromes (Kleinman 1980).4 Ethnomedicine is grounded in the study of everyday life, perceptions of the normal and natural, the desirable and feared, and that form of embodied knowledge known as common sense as it emerges in efforts to establish or reestablish health as one aspect of well-being. Ethnomedical inquiry entails the study of how well-being and suffering are experienced bodily as well as socially, the multivocality of somatic communication, and processes of healing as they are contextualized and directed toward the person, household, community and state, land and cosmos.5 Ethnomedicine also entails a study of the afflicted body as a space where competing ideologies are contested and emergent ideologies are developed through medico-religious practices and institutions which guide the production of knowledge.