African American Folk Healing

2. Healing, the Black Body, and Institutional Medicine: Contexts for Crafting Wellness

2 Healing, the Black Body, and Institutional Medicine Contexts for Crafting Wellness There are a good many folks carrying mojos around Alabama and Louisiana and Arkansas—you could fill the hold of a cotton boat with them. Some folks call them “greegrees.” The conjur men who make them up put all kinds of things inside—dried blood, dirt from a graveyard, frizzled chicken feathers, dried-up bird feet, and things like that. I don’t see nothing good about any of them. They all is fooling somebody. —Excerpt from The Big Old World of Richard Creeks, 19621 Frameworks for Healing from African American Perspectives Healing is a culturally bound concept. Although there are larger societal frameworks, there are also intimate ones from particular cultures that inform individuals in dialogue with or despite the larger social structures. The operative frameworks for healing concepts among African Americans involve many intricately layered strata that are woven or blended together. One layer of these understandings hearkens back to African cultural orientations. Anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price use the term “African cognitive orientations,” which captures a sense of how “African-ness” was retained. The term recognizes that links between the past and present, between cultural realities and physical conditions, are not severed simply because of a change in location. Mintz and Price refer to African cognitive orientations as [o]n the one hand, basic assumptions about social relations (which values motivate individuals, how one deals with others in social situ34 ations, and matters of interpersonal style), and, on the other, basic assumptions and expectations about the way the world functions phenomenologically (for instance, beliefs about causality, and how particular causes are revealed). We would argue that certain common orientations to reality may tend to focus the attention of individuals from West and Central African cultures upon similar kinds of events, even though the ways for handling these events may seem quite diverse in formal terms.2 These orientations infiltrate and influence African American understandings of health and healing. A closer look at a few dynamics of African understandings of the body, sexuality, and health and healing provides a backdrop for exploring connections with African Americans today. In general, African understandings of the body perceive it “as the agent of concrete totality, radical identity, and ontological unity of the human being.”3 It follows, then, that spiritual values and meanings are reflected in the body itself. One expression of this idea is that differently shaped bodies, sometimes deemed a “deformity” in Western eyes, might instead be considered spiritually meaningful, depending on the African tradition. The body signals something about the spiritual life, encompassing the personal, familial, and communal in the present moment. More than that, the body connects the person to the ancestors and a new birth in a family may signal the return of an ancestral spirit.4 Through a holistic mindset, health and healing are related to religion and spirituality in African understandings. Health and healing are key values in African traditional religion, connected as they are with the fundamental theme of life. For many Africans, sickness is a diminution of life, and healing is a sacred activity second only to that of giving life.5 The historian Albert Raboteau offers a statement of the African understandings of the interconnections of person, community and nature: “Africans conceived of the individual self . . . as constituted by a web of kinship relations. . . . Long before western medicine recognized the fact, African traditional healers stressed that interpersonal relations affected people’s health.”6 This sense of unity of person and community is reflected in the concept of human being, particularly noted in the ways body and spirit are understood as related and unified. In this view, the human person is not a divided body and soul Healing, the Black Body, and Institutional Medicine 35 but a whole being. When the physical or spiritual are in conflict, illness of the body or relationships result. Likewise, a community can be deemed ill. A person or the community can be cured spiritually as well as physically. Ideas from the African continent traveled to the United States with black people. The epistemological frameworks of people in Africa continued in the Americas and with good reasons. Social conditions of forced emigration to the United States, under the horrors of enslavement , insured that cultural retentions became crucial factors in survival. Colonization was enacted on black bodies...