Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions

2. Critical Approaches to Literature and Theories

Chapter 2 CriticalApproaches to Literature and Theories To arrive at any sort of comprehensive understanding of vernacular health belief systems it is necessary to be able to connect them with a theoretical understanding of belief in general, as well as with an understanding of culture and the cultural frameworks with which all belief systems are interconnected. Belief and behavior are stronglyculturally shaped, and definitionsof health and illnessare cultural products. The most productive approach to vernacular healing systemsisnecessarily an interdisciplinary effort, for belief and behavior are complex phenomena , and all explanations of complex phenomena are partial accounts . An interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach provides multiple reference points and enables differing conceptions to be balanced against and to illuminate each other, providing a more comprehensive view both of the subjectand of the various approaches to it. Several disciplines have either addressed folk and popular health belief systemsdirectly or have engaged in related studies that contribute much to our current capacity to grasp the subject in productive and comprehensive ways. Over time, the regnant socialand academic theories and their related concerns and convictions have selectivelyfocused disciplinary attention on particular subjects and objects of interest. These theories and concerns have shaped the scholarship in specific ways. Always at issue, more or less overtly, has been a set of academic beliefs about human nature; about the characteristics of societies or their subgroups; about the nature and production of knowledge and belief; about morals, values, and ethics; and about the relationship of the studier to the studied. In the past twenty years or so this subtext has become a subject of study in itself. This reflexive reorientation has produced a critical inquiry into past approaches, taking into account the cultural shaping of academic and professional knowledge, and articulating the relationships of authority between professional and popular or indigenous ways of knowing. 36 Chapter 2 The Evolutionary Theory of Culture Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century investigators of folklore pursued their studies in the well-established atmosphere of antiquarianism , a long-standing intellectual tradition that focused its attentions on all manner of cultural "curiosities," so classified because they were believed to be left over from bygone times. Among these "novel remnants " were included narratives, formulae, manners of dress and performance , and customary practices and observances that were seen as persisting under specific types of circumstances, in spite of a more general social disuse or abandonment. These ostensiblyanachronistic cultural outcroppings were typically explained in terms consistent with the social and anthropological theory of culturalevolution. This theory posited the development of peoples and societies by analogy with evolution of plant and animal species, as a linear progression from simpler to more complex, sophisticated, and better-adapted forms over time. It postulated that societies pass through an orderly sequence of developmental phases en route from their most "primitive" to their most "civilized" forms, and equated more civilized forms with the complex and industrialized societies that had produced the scholars and theorizers. These advanced cultures would themselves previously "have gone through the stage of culture now seen in 'primitive' societies . Just as fossils remained in the earth to show earlier life-forms, so cultural fossils might remain hidden in the thought of sophisticated societies, which would show traces of earlier beliefs and customs. The folklore of the people was [considered] just such a survival" (Bennett 1987:3). A parallel analogy was made to broadly defined developmental stages in individuals,as well. "Primitive" societies were understood to be less socially, educationally, and technically sophisticated than "civilized " societies, and their individual adult members were believed to be—like children—less mentally,emotionally,and cognitively sophisticated than "civilized" or "modern" adults (see, e.g., Black 1883:206). The evolutionarytheory of cultures embodied a view of the refinement and perfection of knowledge as both a condition for and a result of social development. In this view, more advanced societies invariably "knew better," both in the sense of having better knowledge and in the sense of having better ways of producing knowledge, than those in earlier stages. Beliefs and practices rejected or left behind by the "official" culture of civilized societies became ipso facto the erroneous products of a less evolved understanding. They were called cultural "survivals." Their study, together with the study of entire culturesstill apparently in earlier evolutionary stages (i.e.,the primitive1 culturesof Critical Approaches 37 anthropological interest), was embraced by many intellectuals of the period as a valuable archaeology of human...