From the fat of our souls : social change, political process, and medical pluralism in Bolivia /

Based on Crandon-Malamud's 1976-78 doctoral fieldwork in a community near Ancoraimes on the southeast side of Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, the book analytically focuses on the use of religion and medicine as two appropriate vectors defining ethnicity, class, and social context. As a means of explication, the author employs contrasting pairs of categories: Evangelical Methodist Aymara are compared to traditional, syncretic Catholic Aymara; Aymara Indians to "vecino" mestizos of the town; and followers of systems of indigenous medical beliefs to those using allopathic cosmopolitan medical practices. Because of fieldwork limitations, the best discussion is of the small number (about 3% of the community in 1976) of Evangelical Methodist Aymara converts, of the mestizo townspeople, and of the impact of medical and ethnic plurality on their sociopolitical institutions. The book will supplement J.W. Bastien's Healers of the Andes: the Kallawaya Herbalists and Their Medicinal Plants (CH, Jul'88) in providing a view of medicine as a component of ethnicity in a more urbanized context. There are 30 pages of appendixes with statistics and definitions relating to 93 nosological categories and cures of the vecinos, Evangelical Methodists, and Catholic Aymara. The study will be of particular interest to Andean social anthropologists and students of ethnomedicine. Good references; illustrations are limited to scattered line drawings. Advanced undergraduates and up.-D. L. Browman, Washington University