Ethnomedicine

Ethnomedicine–Old

Ethnomedical beliefs and practices were the products of indigenous cultural developments outside of “modern medicine.” Writers unabashedly referred to such systems as “primitive,” and “irrational.” Because these systems were assumed to be based upon custom, they were, by definition, inefficacious “beliefs” in contrast to the putatively certain “knowledge” of biomedicine. Whether they were the ultimately biological theories of misfortune(witchcraft, as among the Azande) or the diagnosis of skin maladies among the Subanun, any reported ethnomedical efficacy derived “coincidentally” when their beliefs paralleled those of “scientific” medicine.

Early researchers, from Rivers forward, recognized the intimate interconnections of medical with other cultural ideas; no separation existed between medicine and other cultural domains such as religion, gender, or social structure. Researchers assumed this separation held for biomedicine.

Ethnomedical studies' central foci of concern were systems of classification of illness and etiological theories. Researchers developed broad generalizations that often served to bolster the dichotomy between “primitive” or folk medical systems and “scientific medicine.” These etiological theories were dichotomized and classified as concepts as “naturalistic” (caused by outside forces and events such as ecological changes) or “personalistic” (caused by specific agents such as witches or sorcerers) or “externalizing and internalizing” medical systems. Such notions dichotomized ethnomedical systems in terms of their logic.

Diagnosis and therapeutic approaches to illness, including rituals, pharmacopoeias, and body manipulation, attracted attention as did the healers themselves. Shamans as well as sorcerers and diviners received considerable interest, including research on recruitment. A research staple was the plethora of folk, or culturebound, disorders(for example, susto, amok, latah, koro). Ethnomedical nosologies are not universal, as biomedicine asserts with respect to its own classifications. Rather, such systems are local, as are many of the illness entities they classify. An example is the well-studied system of humoral pathology in the Americas. As well, what is regarded as a symptom of illness or health varies from culture to culture. Signs of sickness in one culture are signs of health in another. This is the case with depressive ideation, which is seen as troubling in the United States but suggests growing enlightenment in Buddhist cultures.

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