Anthropological approaches to the study of ethnomedicine /

This collection provides a broad and diffuse redefinition of ethnomedicine, one that goes well beyond the familiar cataloging of folk illnesses, native remedies, and healing rituals. It consists of ten essays that reflect diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of ethnomedicine, plus the editor's insightful commentaries on the articles. Authors draw on ethnographic research in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Two essays apply epidemiological frameworks to study treatment efficacy and prevalence of a folk illness. Three essays are concerned with how affliction and healing are negotiated through discourse and narrative between patient and healer. Three others illustrate different perspectives on the anthropology of the body; they also examine the complementarity between notions of health in the physical organism and the maintenance of health in the social body. One author analyzes a native system of medicine and relates it to the group's self-concepts. Another presents an ayurvedic practitioner's theory of cancer, in which he employs medical discourse to link cancer to sociopolitical ills. Chapter bibliographies and notes. Graduate; faculty; professional. E. Wellin; University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee