Central issues in anthropology : a journal of the Central States Anthropological Society最新文献

Therapeutic healing symbols should be recognized as being embedded in and arising from a cultural context, which both specialists and nonspecialists then draw upon in treating the sick. The symbolic aspects of material features of medical systems have been discussed in reference to biomedicine, but little discussion has been devoted to these symbolic dimensions of traditional medical systems. Ethnographic data from an Andean hamlet in Northern Peru provides evidence that the symbolic content of remedies is rooted in the collective experience of the people and can be shared across all types of healing encounters. The three symbolic qualities of materia medica identified are blackness, topicality and liquidity, [index words: symbolic healing, ethnomedicine, medical anthropology, Peru, Andes]

Infant Mortality in Nepal is among the highest in the world. Since the 1950s a number of studies have examined the causes of infant mortality in Nepal. This study attempts to identify the causes of infant mortality using a comprehensive approach. In other words, this study incorporates biological, socio-economic, behavioral, psychological, environmental, and health care factors to provide a thorough understanding of the underlying causes of infant mortality.

Data for the study was collected in the Fall of 1987 and were based on interviews with 621 mothers who gave birth between April 15,1984 and April 14,1986 in twenty-six randomly selected villages in Deokhari Valley, Western Nepal.

The results indicate that biological factors are the intermediate or proximate variables through which all other variables operate to affect infant mortality. The study concludes by stressing the need for a comprehensive approach in health care services that emphasize both the curative as well as preventive aspects.

Prior research on the presence of medical pluralism and factors affecting utilization patterns within such societies/systems have been able to provide only variable oriented explanations. This paper draws on differentiation theory to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the context of medical pluralism in the developing countries. For the purpose, the South Asian country of Nepal is selected as a basic example. It is inferred that the arguments/theory presented in the paper will be applicable to other third world societies which have medical pluralism as well. This paper suggests that differentiation in these third world societies has not resulted in the formation of a single formal health care complex as in most developed countries. For example, in Nepal three overlapping and competing health care systems (folk, traditional, modern) have evolved producing a pattern we call “incomplete differentiation” in which there are no clearly demarcated boundaries separating the responsibilities of each health care system. Furthermore, in this incompletely differentiated system, modern medicine faces stiff competition with the folk/traditional health care systems over cultural legitimation.

One of the central concerns that is common to a broad spectrum of post-Nietzschean philosophies is the critical deconstruction of the metaphysical foundations of the discourse in the West. The opus of Michel Foucault, more specifically his critique of the epistemological centrality of the modern concept of Man and the discourse/culture of anthropocentrism which is predicated on it, represents a continuation of that tradition. This text explores the implications of Foucault's critique for the science of anthropology, addressing specifically the latter's relation to the anthropocentric episteme. In the concluding section it brings on an interesting opposition between anthropology as the project of human self-knowledge and ethnology as cultural transcendence and encounter with the culturally other.

In examining an history of ethnographic investigations of the Ryukyus, a long chain of islands south of Japan, this paper proposes to identify a process by which the Ryukyuan culture is constructed as the authentic, exotic Other, a process to which not only Japanese ethnographers and folklorists but also Western anthropologists have actively contributed. The search for authentic culture in the Ryukyus, prima facie a theoretical as well as empirical issue, cannot be separated from social and political contexts in which such a search has taken place. This paper analyzes a system of signification that not only defines but also formulates the authentic Ryukyus as an object of study and that excludes as a consequence the “emergent Ryukyus,” which reflects the creative, reinventive efforts of the current Ryukyuan people.

Belief, it may seem, is the bedrock of cultural anthropology. In fact, though, we can move from belief to discourse without the loss of anything essential…. There must be a place for representations (held to be true) of information; of knowledge of past, present, and future states of the world; of contingent relationships among phenomena; and of our own and others' mental states and processes–in short, of any conceivable factual matter. These are what people call beliefs.