Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transliteration
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 The dialectics of healing power
- Part I History and ethnography of biomedicine
- Part II The moral discourse of medical pluralism
- 5 The Catholic practice of healing
- 6 Houngan and the limits to Catholic morality
- 7 Religious healing and the fragmentation of rural life
- 8 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Catholic practice of healing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transliteration
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 The dialectics of healing power
- Part I History and ethnography of biomedicine
- Part II The moral discourse of medical pluralism
- 5 The Catholic practice of healing
- 6 Houngan and the limits to Catholic morality
- 7 Religious healing and the fragmentation of rural life
- 8 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The morality of healers in rural Haiti
The actions taken to treat Janine Dutoit and Dieusauveur Martin exemplify how people negotiate between several different medical idioms over the course of a single illness episode. The case of Dieusauveur, in particular, demonstrates how much is at stake in naming a disorder and explaining what caused it. Not just his health, but also his moral status – whether he was an innocent or guilty victim of a maladi Satan – hung in the balance during the help-seeking process. However, healing practitioners themselves also move between several different conceptions of the source of therapeutic power. The struggles of these healers to authorize their own therapeutic knowledge and challenge the legitimacy of competing options is the topic of this chapter.
Jean Milot, a doktè fèy (herbalist), and Mme. Marie Beaumont, the midwife who originally diagnosed Janine Dutoit's disorder as eklampsi, enjoy secure reputations as effective healers among many residents of Jeanty. By narrating their life-histories and accounting for their particular skills, these healers take up a specific position in a plural moral universe. That is, they each appropriate a certain notion of upright ethical action in order to authorize their own therapeutic practice as both effective and morally correct. Like many other healing specialists in rural Haiti, they stake their moral claims in religious terms; in particular, by drawing on the several discourses of popular Haitian religion about the moral value of angels and spirits.
Residents of Jeanty consult a remarkably large array of non-biomedical healers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medicine and Morality in HaitiThe Contest for Healing Power, pp. 109 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996