Reading Questions

Singer/Baer/Long/Pavlotski

Chapter 6

People, Places, Concepts and Questions

People, Places & Concepts

Ethnomedicines

Culture-bound syndromes

Cultural idioms of distress

Shaman

Therapeutic management group

Navajo sand painting

Dine

Cross-cultural healing

Disease theory system

Health-care system

Personalist disease systems

Naturalist disease systems

Wounded healer

Personalist practitioners

Naturalist practitioners

Internalizing systems

Externalizing systems

Biological adaptation for sickness and healing (SH)

Illness of God

Illness of human beings

Fabrega

Institution/system of medicine

Foucault/Birth of the Clinic

Clinical gaze

Discussion Questions

1. What are the four ethnomedical typologies presented by Singer/Baer? What are their similarities and differences? How would you compare Das’ analytical framework to the three typologies?

2. How do Singer & Baer’s evolutionary model link disease theories and healing systems to subsistence strategies and sociopolitical organization? Do you find their discussion persuasive?

Pigg

Terms, Places & Peoples

Shaman/dhami-jhānkis

Modernity/”tradition”/”premodern”

Modernization

Development

Belief/(andha)bíswās

Differentiated locality

Cosmopolitanism

Objectification

Discussion Questions

1. What kinds of illnesses do shaman and biomedical doctors treat? How does this differentiation symbolize relations between a local village and the cosmopolitan modern world?

2. Pigg states that “it is possible [for Nepali cosmopolitans] to assert decade after decade that ‘modern medicine’ is coming to villages for the very first time.” What dynamics are at work here? Why does cosmopolitanism require “credulous believers”?

3. In what ways do international development agencies conceive of the “beliefs” of villagers? How do they associate these beliefs with group identities and ethnicities?

4. How do villagers find a shaman who “knows”?

5. How does Pigg position herself in her work and writing? How does this compare to Scheper-Hughes’ approach?