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- Convenors:
-
Lisa Dikomitis
(Keele University)
Vassos Argyrou (University of Hull)
- Location:
- JUB-117
- Start time:
- 11 September, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to explore what might be called the rehabilitation of the natural and the 'traditional' in 'modern' Western cultures when it comes to issues concerning health and wellbeing.
Long Abstract:
The aim of this panel is to explore what might be called the rehabilitation of the natural and the 'traditional' in 'modern' Western cultures when it comes to issues concerning health and wellbeing. What we have in mind is a range of practices that include the 'de-medicalisation' of pregnancy, the turn towards 'natural' or 'traditional' childbirth and breastfeeding, the increasing popularity of natural, homeopathic or 'naturopathic' medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. It would seem that what underlies these practices is the view, often implicitly maintained rather than explicitly stated that nature 'knows best' and that therefore, it should be allowed to take its own course without outside intervention. Related to this is the idea that outside interference often has contrary results and may cause irreversible damage. This contrasts sharply with the medico-scientific view that we know better than nature and the preceding generations and that intervention is the only way to achieve high standards of health and to prolong human life. It also differentiates 'modern' Western cultures from peripheral European and non-Western cultures in which the medico-scientific view may be still be dominant and distinguishes them for having questioned what was for so long taken for granted—a practice that some authors understand as 'reflexive modernisation'. It is at this point that the natural and the 'traditional' become 'modern' and the modern—the medico-scientific paradigm—traditional or worse. This panel invites colleagues to reflect on these changes with ethnographic and/or theoretical contributions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ari Gandsman (University of Ottawa)
Paper short abstract:
The right to die is often seen as a reaction against the medicalization of death, but it is also simultaneously part of medicalization processes. By examining how right to die advocates navigate this contradiction, this paper will show how they argue for a particular kind of "natural" death.
Paper long abstract:
Assisted dying - the medical hastening of death - as a prominent political concern is considered to emerge as a reaction against medical technologies that have the ability to prolong life and is seen to be part of the larger death awareness and hospice movement of the 1970s. However, rather than a response to emerging medical dominance over all spheres of life, the right to die is also an example of this process. While right to die advocates often contrast a protracted hospital death hooked to machines with a swift and merciful assisted death in the comfort of one's home, the two are products of the same medical logic that seeks to master and control the dying process. In that sense, right to die activists explicitly argue against a "biotechnical embrace" of the dying process even when the right to die as a medico-legal concern places the dying process as an object of medical and legal regulation and public policy. In other words, the right to die is as much an example as the medicalization of death as it is a reaction against it, an example of what Shai Lavi terms the "modern art of dying." At the same time, right to die activists are cognisant of these contradictions and paradoxically argue that the only way to ensure a more "natural" death is through access to medically assisted death. This paper will analyze how right to die advocates understand these particularly "modern" deaths as simultaneously "natural" ones.
Isabella Riccò (Rovira i Virgili University)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of the article is to describe the traditional therapeutic ritual of segnatura and explore how alternative medicine uses it like a part of his therapies.
Paper long abstract:
Segnatura, still practiced in parts of Italy, is a traditional diagnostic-therapeutic folk ritual for treating specific illnesses (herpes zoster, sprains, erysipelas, pinworm infection). It exploits the symbolic and empirical effectiveness of incantations, objects, signs and unguents. Based on ethnographic research in the region of Emilia Romagna on medical pluralism, this article analyzes the dynamism and creativity of the ritual and how it is used by holistic therapists. Two case studies (i.e. a segnatura initiation ritual carried out on December 24th 2013, and organized by an association that is concerned with analogical medicine and Enrica's therapist) demonstrate how the traditional practice of segnatura has adapted to alternative medicine through its continuing relation to sacredness.
Kimberly Sigmund (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the practice of natural medicine in Mexico City, and how practitioners of natural medicine challenge existing conceptions of health while subverting biomedical dominance through a focus on the clean or dirty state of the body as an indicator and catalyst for health or illness.
Paper long abstract:
After a century of biomedical dominance in Mexico; during which all forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) were discredited, vilified, or ignored; multiple forms of CAM are now openly being practiced throughout the country. However, almost all CAM is still unrecognised and unregulated by the Mexican Government. Currently, a resurgence of interest in natural healing methods is visible in both the proliferation of shops selling 'natural items' and clinics for natural healing. This interest appears to be due to the population's overall dissatisfaction with the corrupt and underfunded national health system, the lack of conformity by biomedical doctors to Mexican social norms, and the lack of results that patients see after using biomedicine. This paper explores this phenomenon through a version of CAM in Mexico called naturismo, or natural medicine. Drawing on ethnographic data, I discuss the unique medical epistemologies that are utilised within naturismo, which, as I will demonstrate, separate naturismo from both traditional medicine and biomedicine. Using rhetoric about the dichotomy between a clean or dirty body as an indicator for health, and the necessity of a vegetarian diet to regain health, the practitioners of naturismo (los médicos naturistas) attempt to challenge their patients' perceptions about what it means to be healthy, and what a 'good healer' is. Overall, I argue that naturistas appear to be subverting biomedical dominance and challenging pre-existing healthcare and dietary norms in Mexico by looking to and glorifying a pre-Hispanic 'natural' and healthier past.