The Ashgate Research Companion to Anthropology

Andrew J. Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754677031
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317044109
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This companion provides an indispensable overview of contemporary and classical issues in social and cultural anthropology. Although anthropology has expanded greatly over time in terms of the diversity of topics in which its practitioners engage, many of the broad themes and topics at the heart of anthropological thought remain perennially vital, such as understanding order and change, diversity and continuity, and conflict and co-operation in the reproduction of social life. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, the contributors to this volume provide us with thoughtful and fruitful ways of thinking about a number of contemporary and long-standing arenas of work where both established and more recent researchers are engaged. The companion begins by exploring classic topics such as Religion; Rituals; Language and Culture; Violence; and Gender. This is followed by a focus on current developments within the discipline including Human Rights; Globalization; and Diasporas and Cosmopolitanism. It provides an interesting and challenging look at the state of current thinking in anthropology, serving as a rich resource for scholars and students alike.

PART I
Religion, Experience and Change

1
Healing

Geoffrey Samuel

Introduction

Healing, which I use in this chapter as a generic term for practices intended to relieve pain, restore damage or deterioration, or assist in the attainment of the best possible functioning of the human organism (Alter 1999), has been a major preoccupation within virtually all societies studied by anthropologists. Yet while practices and ideas concerning healing have been noted from the early days of anthropology, their study took place for many years in a curiously oblique manner. Anthropologists looked at systems of thought relating to healing, and at magical, ritual or shamanic practices intended to bring about healing. Healing itself, however, as a practice that might bring about genuine results in the real world, remained largely out of focus until the development of medical anthropology in the 1980s. This was because the organic effects of healing were seen as the concern of medicine, not of anthropology, and the medical science of the times did not take these healing practices seriously. This was particularly so in relation to those modes of healing which were not based on pharmacological substances or other material procedures: shamanic healing, spirit healing and the like. Such practices, generally classed as magic, religion or ritual, are the primary focus in this chapter, since it is here that anthropological analysis has had the most to contribute. As we will see, these modes of healing point to aspects of the healing process that are (or at any rate should be) also significant for biomedical practice.

Today, biomedicine has come to dominate state and public medical provision throughout the world, and the development of ‘evidence-based medicine’ has reinforced its claims to a privileged status as the sole source of valid knowledge about healing. Anthropologists are however now far more willing to challenge that privileged status. This change is the result of a shift in popular consciousness in regard to healing practices, a shift to which the discipline of anthropology itself has contributed to a significant degree. Most Western societies today live in a situation of de facto medical pluralism. Large parts of the general population today accept without much demur the idea that biomedicine has no monopoly on healing. While the degree to which non-Western and other ‘alternative’ medical systems have received official recognition and legitimation varies from country to country, the idea that Ayurveda, Tibetan or Chinese traditional medicine, herbalism, homeopathy, yoga, various forms of visualisation, spirit healing, reiki and even more exotic practices may play a useful part in the healing process has been widely accepted among all sectors of the population. This has created a climate to which anthropology, among other disciplines, has responded.

At the time when the basic approaches of contemporary social and cultural anthropology were being developed, however, the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, such tolerance of alternative healing was much less prevalent among educated society. The anthropologists of that time lived in a world where non-Western modes of healing, especially those of small-scale, technologically simple societies, were routinely disparaged as primitive and meaningless. Biomedical science, the academic discipline that derived from and supported the growth of modern medicine, had little interest in these healing practices, regarding them as useless at best, if not actually damaging to patients. Shamans were regarded as examples of psychopathology, and if indigenous populations were willing to employ their services, this only demonstrated their ignorance and naivety. At most, pre-modern medicine might have discovered a few herbal remedies with some genuine pharmacological effects, and in this sense might be regarded as a crude precursor to the achievements of biomedical science. Even the complex and sophisticated medical practices of the Islamic world, India, Tibet and China were routinely regarded as of little or no practical value.

Before being too dismissive of such attitudes, we should appreciate that in the mid-twentieth century the overall picture of illness had been recently and dramatically transformed for much of the Western world. This had come about through the provision of safe water supply, proper sanitary arrangements, hygiene both in medical and hospital practice and in daily life, the growth of vaccination and inoculation against common infectious diseases, and the development of the first generations of antibiotic drugs, such as the sulfonamides, introduced in the mid-1930s, and penicillin, in the early 1940s. The germ theory of disease provided a convincing theoretical basis for the spectacular success of these new procedures. The introduction of effective anaesthesia and antiseptic procedures had transformed surgery, and the relief of pain had become part of everyday life. If the populations of advanced Western societies today take much of this for granted, at the time it was a huge achievement in terms of human wellbeing. This transformation in people’s experience of illness and pain also facilitated and was encouraged by the progressive secularisation of Western society over the same period, which itself involved a massive loss of faith in the reality of the spirit world. Initial approaches within anthropology to healing need to be seen against this background. Scholars such as Edward Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski and Sergei Shirokogoroff were both products of their own time, and struggling themselves to make sense of practices which they had been taught to regard as being of very little value, and as based on modes of thinking that were intrinsically non-rational.

By the early twenty-first century, the secularisation of society has come to seem much less total and irreversible than it did, and the achievements of biomedicine have also become more open to question. Today we are as likely to see the large pharmaceutical companies, with their questionable trade practices and their deliberate manipulation of biomedical research to support their sales strategies, pushing dubious products that may often do more harm than good onto those who do not need them, as an expression of the malign dominance of large corporations over contemporary society (Healy 2012; Goldacre 2012). Biomedicine itself, especially in the highly commercialised and privatised forms prevalent in countries without effective state health systems, can seem an increasingly suspect enterprise, at best distributing its benefits selectively to those who are most able to afford them, at worst encouraging excessive and harmful levels of medical intervention. The overuse and inappropriate use of pharmaceuticals, and the consequent growth of drug-resistant strains of bacteria, is reversing many of the positive achievements of the past in the area of public health. Nevertheless, however justified the criticisms of biomedicine and the pharmaceutical industry today, the structures of evidence-based medicine, now routinely subverted by Big Pharma to promote problematic products, or employed by national medical associations as a protectionist strategy against competing forms of healing, were undoubtedly intended by their originators as positive interventions aimed at the public benefit. The new approaches to the anthropology of healing that developed from the 1980s onwards are situated within this academic and social context; the work of scholars such as Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock or Emily Martin are interventions within this much more complex and contested field.

The general perspective from which this chapter is written may be summarised as follows: biomedical science, with its focus on the material and physiological levels, provides a productive and valid explanation of part of the healing process, but that explanation is not complete or exhaustive. As research on the so-called placebo effect and related phenomena demonstrates, much of the healing process is independent of therapeutic interventions at the physical level, relating more to the ability of the organism to mobilise its own healing resources (e.g. Moerman 2002; Moerman and Jonas 2002; Wilce 2003; Samuel 2006a, 2006b). This process, which in many cases is as or more significant than any therapeutic intervention, appears to involve both body and mind, both conscious and unconscious factors, and is critically associated with issues of subjective meaning. This is where anthropology and related disciplines of social and cultural analysis have a vital role to play in the understanding of healing. These disciplines are able to critique and deconstruct biomedical assertions regarding the centrality of therapeutic interventions on the physical level and the insignificance of other (‘subjective’, social, cultural) aspects of the healing process, and to work towards an understanding of how these other aspects may be more effectively mobilised to facilitate healing.

The significance of medical anthropology is certainly not limited to this area. One might point in particular to the critical and very important work done by medical anthropologists on the political economy of medicine and healing, and so on the actual ability of populations around the world to access healing resources. However, I would suggest that the area of culture and meaning, and its linkage to the healing process, is where medical anthropology has a unique role to play in the understanding of healing.

Precursors and Foundations

As the historical contextualisation with which I began might suggest, initial approaches to healing practices within the small-scale, non-Western societies where most early anthropology was located took the form of rationalist deconstructions of those practices, of explanations of why native populations undertook practices that almost by definition did not or could not work. In those days, anthropologists had, in effect, to choose between seeing the world in the terms of the native populations they were studying, or in those of the modern industrial societies of the West. In practice, ‘going native’ was not a serious career option. Even if anthropologists might have a genuine sympathy for the worlds they studied, they knew better than to admit it in their publications. Here the locus classicus is doubtless Edward Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard 1937), but one can also see a similar strategy of explaining away in Bronislaw Malinowski’s Magic, Science and Religion (Malinowski 1954). The foundations of this mode of argument can be found in the work on magic of Sir James Fraser, with its analysis of the logic of similarity and contagion, and his predecessors.

Evans-Pritchard’s approach in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande focused on the logic of explanation in African responses to misfortune. It was premised on the assumption that while Zande ideas about witchcraft, the oracles, the ‘witch-doctors’ and magic formed a coherent system, the underlying concepts were not and could not be true. Thus when the Zande fed a (presumably poisonous) substance to a chicken, waited to see if it would die, and interpreted the chicken’s living or dying as an answer to a specific question, such as whether witchcraft was present, Evans-Pritchard took it for granted that whether the chicken lived or died could not have any actual relationship with the question asked. The system of ideas was self-evidently false, and Evans-Pritchard’s analysis concerned how it was that the Zande continued to accept a system of ideas based upon false premises. Since the responses of the oracle could have no relationship to the question, and could only be explained by factors such as the strength with which the poison was prepared or the health of the chicken, the results of the oracle would necessarily be inconsistent: how was it that the Zande did not realise this?

Evans-Pritchard’s answer, as is well known, was to point to processes of ‘secondary elaboration’ that explained away apparent inconsistencies. If the same question were asked on more than one occasion, for example, and different answers were obtained, this was the result of witchcraft interfering with the oracle, of taboos being broken, errors in the management of the oracle and so on (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 330). Evans-Pritchard’s analysis is one of the classic texts of British social anthropology, and was influential in the subsequent development of the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science, since it became evident that similar processes could be observed in many systems of knowledge, including Western science itself. Thus Evans-Pritchard’s work became significant in the context of the so-called rationality debate within British philosophy (Winch 1964; Wilson 1970; Horton and Finnegan 1973; Hollis and Lukes 1982). From the point of view of understanding healing, however, it provided effective support for the rationalist deconstruction of non-Western systems of thought. Evans-Pritchard certainly helped to explain why non-Western healing practices might continue in use despite their not being efficacious, but he was fundamentally uninterested in considering whether and how they might actually have some real effects.

Malinowski’s analysis in Magic, Science and Religion (Malinowski 1954), while more psychological in its orientation, was equally unconcerned with the effectiveness of magical healing practices. Malinowski was quite interested in the effects of magical ritual in promoting confidence in situations of uncertainty, and also (particularly in his later study of agricultural magic, Coral Gardens, Malinowski 1935), in magical ritual’s logical and linguistic form, but he was not interested in magic’s possible efficacy. As Siegfried Nadel put it in an essay on Malinowski:

Withal, naturally, the powers ‘beyond the normal’ promised by magic are only an illusion, if one reinforced by spurious successes and by the general human reluctance to abandon cherished and comforting beliefs. But though magic is akin to ‘wish-fulfilment’ and ‘day-dreaming’ it is not of the stuff that dreams are made of. It shows in activity; it encourages and permits action where a dispassionate assessment of conditions might leave no scope for rational effort. (Nadel 1957: 195)

However an alternative and more sociological approach to magical healing had already been prefigured in the work of Émile Durkheim, since the concept of ‘collective effervescence’ in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life clearly implies that ritual (and so magic, as a form of ritual) can have a positive effect on the social group (Durkheim 1965; Buehler 2012). ‘Collective effervescence’ had a mixed reception, but the idea was picked up by other authors, most notably perhaps by the Russian anthropologist Sergei Mikhailovitch Shirokogoroff, who spelled out the possible sociological implications with remarkable prescience in the 1920s. In a short paper from 1923 Shirokogoroff presented the elements of his ‘general theory of shamanism’, in other words of shamanic practice among the Tungus people of Siberia (the people among whom the term ‘shaman’ itself originated). There are a number of fascinating things about Shirokogoroff’s treatment, but I begin with his concluding comment:

The theory of ghosts or spirits, their relations to men are only the forms that in the mind of the shamanist generalize all the phenomena of normal and pathological psychic life. The shaman and shamanism are the organs and system regulating these phenomena and have for their principal concern the hygienic and preventive quality, par excellence. (Shirokogoroff 1923: 249)

Shirokogoroff’s vocabulary of ‘psychic hygiene’ reads oddly today, but in fact his argument was posed at both the psychological and the sociological level, and it focused primarily on what the shaman is doing in relation to the community (or what the community is doing to and for itself through recourse to the shaman) rather than on the shaman’s personal mental or psychological state. Earlier in the same article he noted that:

The nervous and psychical maladies which are commonly found among the Tungus Tribes wax and wane. The normal life of the clan becomes interrupted and, during periods of increase, nutrition and natality are reduced, mortality increased, and the very existence of the clan threatened … Within the clan maladies of this kind are stopped just in the nick of time, when all harmful ghosts, being possessed by some person of the clan, are submitted to the ‘master’. Such a ‘master’ is the shaman who becomes, if the analogy be allowed, the ‘safety valve’ of the clan. … Shamanism as a preventative is a kind of clan self-defence and an apparent aspect of its biological functions. (Shirokogoroff 1923: 247 and 248)

Thus Shirokogoroff suggested that the shaman acted as a kind of emergency mechanism, which came into action primarily in times of crisis. The specific technique that the shaman used was a secondary question, although it was certainly one in which Shirokogoroff was interested. The key issue was that the shaman was able to deal with crises in the community, crises that manifested in psychological forms but which clearly also, for Shirokogoroff, had sociological and biological implications. The shaman was not the dominant figure of the clan’s religious life, but he came into play in specific situations where his particular skills were needed. Put in other words, Shirokogoroff saw the shaman as a community therapist – or, more accurately perhaps, as part of the way in which the community healed itself. The approach was in fact very similar to that which Victor Turner was to take some 40 years later to the analysis of Ndembu divination in Southern Africa, in Revelation and Divination and Drums of Affliction (Turner 1968, 1975).

Shirokogoroff’s approach was very much the exception in anthropological writing of its time. The vast majority of anthropologists shared the conviction that the spirit-healing practices they observed could not work in their own terms (they presumably regarded herbal healing as potentially valid, if theoretically uninteresting). This is not to say that other currents of thought were not present within Europe, as with the work of Henri Bergson,¹ or, most conspicuously as far as anthropology was concerned, that of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Evans-Pritchard, in his later years at least, took Lévy-Bruhl’s work seriously, and indeed suggested that the participatory mode of thought that Lévy-Bruhl describes was frequently present in the modern European society of his time as well. However he was no more receptive than in the 1930s to seeing ‘participatory’ and ‘mystical’ modes of thought as having useful intellectual content (Evans-Pritchard 1965: 78–99; see also Greenwood 2009: 29–43).

By the time I began studying anthropology at Cambridge in the late ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Lists of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I RELIGION, EXPERIENCE AND CHANGE
• PART II RITUAL, MYTH AND CREATIVITY
• PART III WORK, PLAY AND GENDER
• PART IV STUDIES OF WORLD RELIGIONS
• PART V PERSPECTIVES ON VIOLENCE AND GLOBALIZATION
• PART VI EMERGENT THEMES
• Index