Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transliteration
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 The dialectics of healing power
- Part I History and ethnography of biomedicine
- Part II The moral discourse of medical pluralism
- 5 The Catholic practice of healing
- 6 Houngan and the limits to Catholic morality
- 7 Religious healing and the fragmentation of rural life
- 8 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transliteration
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 The dialectics of healing power
- Part I History and ethnography of biomedicine
- Part II The moral discourse of medical pluralism
- 5 The Catholic practice of healing
- 6 Houngan and the limits to Catholic morality
- 7 Religious healing and the fragmentation of rural life
- 8 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the past twenty-five years, medical anthropology has moved beyond its original applied orientation and engaged with the central theoretical debates of the discipline (and in the human sciences generally) (see Good 1994). Because the interest in certain questions rises and falls over time, we must occasionally revisit older concerns and shake loose the conventional wisdom grown up around them. In this spirit, this book recuperates an early theme of medical anthropology – health-seeking and medical pluralism – and connects it to current debates about practice, agency, and the epistemological claims of anthropological research.
Medical pluralism and practice
The ethnography of illness and healing in Jeanty departs from the twin assumptions in many classic studies of medical pluralism: (1) individuals are rational and voluntaristic actors, and (2) the “health care sectors” of a community form a stable set of discourses and treatments which exist distinct from the subject (cf. Young 1981; Good 1986). This book has argued, first of all, for a more fluid and historicized account of plural healing arrangements. Different therapies do not make up a permanent background structure for people's observable “health-seeking behaviors” (defining symptoms, consulting healers, undergoing treatments, etc.; see Chrisman 1977). To the contrary, such behaviors themselves constitute, reproduce, and destabilize the local array of therapies.
Health-seeking is a form of practice in which people's diverse motivations for seeking out a healer are orchestrated by pre-existing (and in this sense, objective) medical discourses (see Bourdieu 1977:80ff). Over long periods of time, individual acts of consultation, diagnosis, divination, treatment, etc. become routinized and take on recognizable and stable forms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medicine and Morality in HaitiThe Contest for Healing Power, pp. 190 - 201Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996