The Body in Balance

Humoral Medicines in Practice

Peregrine Horden, Elisabeth Hsu, Peregrine Horden, Elisabeth Hsu

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857459831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called "humoral medical traditions, " as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2, 000 years. Exploring notions of "balance" in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to the present, the volume revisits "harmony" and "holism" as main characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances. Balance need not connoteegalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in those bodies?

A Balance of What?

Chapter 8

Balancing Diversity and Well-being

Words, Concepts and Practice in Eastern Africa

David Parkin

Early Notions of Cosmological Balance

I argue in this chapter that many and perhaps most healing methods in sub-Saharan Africa are premised on an idea of relational balance. Some Muslim healers in Africa work from Arabic texts and some incorporate biomedical methods in their treatments. But many so-called indigenous healers in much of Africa work not from texts but from long-term experience and from knowledge and practices handed down to them by tutor healers, who are often family members. It is on these latter healers that I here focus.

Such healers will not therefore normally turn to texts for information on precise criteria of sickness and misfortune. They do sometimes explain illnesses in terms of broadly opposed elements such as the hot and cold, or dry and wet, properties of food, activities and patients’ bodies. But they have to deal with sicknesses and misfortunes that do not lend themselves to explanation through set oppositions of this kind. The problems brought to them are not just those of the body or mind but are often of interpersonal conflict, loss of property and livestock and personal failures. When we translate indigenous terms, we find that a broad notion of ‘misfortune’ usually covers this diversity of problems rather than the narrower ‘sickness’.

This means that, in diagnosing and treating a problem, a healer has to judge whether it is caused by elemental imbalance of the hot/cold kind or by some other kind of imbalance, perhaps resulting from deviant social behaviour, of which witchcraft, sexual transgressions and broken prohibitions are the most common, or from what are regarded as physical disorders such as breech births or a club foot, which, Eurocentrically, might be called ‘natural’ imbalances.

It may well be that, in the absence of diagnostic texts, healers are given the scope to be more experimental in finding explanations and to reach novel conclusions. Healers have therefore to restore either elemental or social imbalance in order to remedy a problem. They are themselves having to balance their judgements of the causes of imbalance. The idea of balance here is as much a question of the healer juggling several factors as of finding an equilibrium between set pairs of elemental oppositions. Relational balance perhaps best describes this process. It presupposes flexibility of interpretation and so is well suited to taking into account the whole person of the patient being diagnosed, including their social circumstances.

The analytical notion of balance in African studies goes back a long way. An early anthropological volume explored comparatively the relationship between African cosmologies and forms of livelihood and subsistence (Forde 1954). In common with the theoretical thrust of functional holism at the time, chapters in that volume described the ‘interdependence’ of social, material and cosmological ideas and values, and that these were ideally to be kept in ‘equilibrium’ or balance with each other, lest misfortune arise. Other terms used to indicate the proper functioning of society and cosmology in balance were ‘harmony’, ‘cooperation’ and (mutual) ‘adjustment’ (Forde 1954: x–xvi). Balance ensured social continuity and the health and fertility of a society’s people, land and livestock, while imbalance created misfortune, ranging from infertility to natural, social and personal disasters. Medicines and rituals were seen to be harnessed in the interests of securing the harmonious interdependence and balance of the cosmos and social behaviour.

The volume’s editor, Darryl Forde, was however careful not to depict the African societies described in the book as static, even if a kind of dynamic homeostasis was implicit, with disruption ‘naturally’ reverting in due course to normality. He referred to the considerable social changes undergone by African societies, though this was a less-treated theme by his contributors, some of whom were to become senior figures in the subject. Forde also emphasized the basic similarity of view between African and European societies in the interdependence of cosmology and society: uncertain social conditions evoke fears of ruptured relationships between humans and the non-human spirit world.

Not acceptable today, however, was his view that, while similar in essence to those of Europe, African cosmological and social beliefs lack the analytical range and depth of European (sic) theories of causation and repair. Thus, ‘Where they [African societies] have differed from the Europeans who have recently come among them has been in the depth and range of their collective knowledge of natural process and in the degree of control and security that they could thereby command’ (Forde 1954: xi).

Nowadays, we would agree with Scott Atran, among others, who points out that many hunting, foraging and, in some cases, horticultural peoples of the kind found in Africa, Amazonia and elsewhere have more advanced understandings of botanical and zoological phenomena through complex systems of taxonomic classifications than many so-called First World peoples who, apart from their scientific specialists, are closed off to such knowledge through dependence on modern, urban technologies (Atran, Medin and Roos 2004).

The point of initially discussing Forde’s compilation, written before the British, French and Portuguese empires in Africa had been removed and with contributions based on fieldwork carried out during the imperial period, is to show how a notion of balance or equilibrium was not only a theoretical starting point in anthropological analyses of the time, but was also believed to characterize the driving force in African society. It was given more prominence than other determinants such as the incursions of colonial depredation, the wage economy, migrant labour, land dispossession and redistribution, the imposition of over-defined ethnic boundaries, and the substitution of new forms of education for indigenous crafts and skills. At first, we might be inclined, therefore, to dismiss such interpretations as too moulded by colonial bias to warrant the idea of homeostatic balance as being at the root of such artificially demarcated ‘tribal’ societies and indigenous kingdoms as described in the collection.

However, later studies did modify such ideas by incorporating modern socio-economic influences, such as rural–urban migration. Victor Turner’s classic studies of the Ndembu of Central Africa took account of their dependence on remittances from urban wage labour. He showed that, although a predominantly rural agricultural society tied to a cash economy, much of their cosmology derived from an earlier hunting-and-gathering ethos, in which ideas of and practices securing moderation were seen as the antidote to acts of excess or depredation, a kind of drive for social and ecological balance. His monograph, The Drums of Affliction (Turner 1968), was one of a number in which he provided instances of a dynamic drive for equilibrium, a theme encouraged by his mentor, Max Gluckman, and some other members of the so-called Manchester/Rhodes-Livingstone school of anthropology (Gluckman 1958). Later, John Janzen was to produce a significant book – called simply Ngoma (Janzen 1992), variously translatable as drum, dance, song, medicine and ritual – which built on Turner’s interest in fundamental cosmological and social concepts, and focused on explaining core African ideas and practices of illness diagnosis and therapy in four areas. It went further in showing the semantic clusters associated with such ideas, or what Ardener called ‘language shadows’ which hint at but are not necessarily exactly isomorphic with them (Ardener 2007: 91). An earlier example is how cultural templates among the Luo of Kenya, shared with contiguous peoples, are partially expressed in key verbal concepts and phrases (Parkin 1978), cases to which I shall return.

So, contrasting with Forde and his contributors’ undeniably sequestered view of African societies as discrete and self-contained, socially and cosmologically, there developed a view of them not as discrete but as constituting a large, overarching tradition of indigenous theories, philosophies, semantic clusters, beliefs and practices which have persisted across great areas of the African continent, often in partially overlapping ways. Extensive work on Africa by Luc de Heusch (1982, 1985) shows the range of key ideas and institutions that run up and down tracts of the continent, especially south of the Sahara, though not exclusively so. De Heusch is the counterpoint to Forde in the delineation of fundamental African concepts. While Forde proceeded from a view of societies in Africa that could be studied as relatively individually bounded and distinctive and whose differences and similarities could be displayed throug...