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8 - Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2009

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Summary

In the past twenty-five years, medical anthropology has moved beyond its original applied orientation and engaged with the central theoretical debates of the discipline (and in the human sciences generally) (see Good 1994). Because the interest in certain questions rises and falls over time, we must occasionally revisit older concerns and shake loose the conventional wisdom grown up around them. In this spirit, this book recuperates an early theme of medical anthropology – health-seeking and medical pluralism – and connects it to current debates about practice, agency, and the epistemological claims of anthropological research.

Medical pluralism and practice

The ethnography of illness and healing in Jeanty departs from the twin assumptions in many classic studies of medical pluralism: (1) individuals are rational and voluntaristic actors, and (2) the “health care sectors” of a community form a stable set of discourses and treatments which exist distinct from the subject (cf. Young 1981; Good 1986). This book has argued, first of all, for a more fluid and historicized account of plural healing arrangements. Different therapies do not make up a permanent background structure for people's observable “health-seeking behaviors” (defining symptoms, consulting healers, undergoing treatments, etc.; see Chrisman 1977). To the contrary, such behaviors themselves constitute, reproduce, and destabilize the local array of therapies.

Health-seeking is a form of practice in which people's diverse motivations for seeking out a healer are orchestrated by pre-existing (and in this sense, objective) medical discourses (see Bourdieu 1977:80ff). Over long periods of time, individual acts of consultation, diagnosis, divination, treatment, etc. become routinized and take on recognizable and stable forms.

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Medicine and Morality in Haiti
The Contest for Healing Power
, pp. 190 - 201
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

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  • Conclusion
  • Paul Brodwin
  • Book: Medicine and Morality in Haiti
  • Online publication: 15 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613128.011
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  • Conclusion
  • Paul Brodwin
  • Book: Medicine and Morality in Haiti
  • Online publication: 15 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613128.011
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Paul Brodwin
  • Book: Medicine and Morality in Haiti
  • Online publication: 15 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613128.011
Available formats
×