Construction of the Body and Personhood: A Comparative Analysis of Religious and Indigenous Healing Practices in India and Tanzania
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- February 26, 2019
- Creator
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Siddiqui, Sydra
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Religious Studies
- Abstract
- Introduction A small black pouch of thin, scratchy fabric, encasing a tightly folded surah from the Qur’an hung around my brother’s neck on a taut string. The sacredness of my brother’s protective amulet was not wasted on me: it miraculously stayed on, through months and years of consecutive wear, through bath time and play time, and despite the near-constant tugging of an easily agitated toddler. This protective amulet, called a taviz, was the reason why my Pakistani mother, a practicing physician of clinical medicine, swore neither I nor my siblings had ever gotten sick as children. In this instance, and in others, my household was often situated on a boundary that was constantly negotiating between clinical medicine and indigenous healing practices. At the time, I did not conceive of taviz as anything more than a symbolic ornamental and culturally specific Pakistani-Islamic tradition. Since then, however, my work in religious studies has led me to revisit taviz and raise salient questions regarding the permeability of the body to evil forces, the pathology of these forces, and cross-cultural traditions of healing. Specifically, in this thesis, I seek to investigate how cross-cultural healing contexts contribute to understandings of the body and of personhood in India and Tanzania, a question that is relevant both to the fields of medical anthropology and religious studies. Medical anthropology is a disciple that is often expected to abate the gap between the humanities and the natural sciences and yet, in various ways, it has failed to do so. Broadly speaking, medical anthropological research on healing rituals in the form of shamanism and spirit possession has demonstrated the difficulties of reconciling reductionist medical models and contextualizing cultural studies work. More specifically, scholars in the field of medical anthropology, as they have attempted to better understand the factors that influence health, the experience and distribution of illness, healing processes, and the treatment of sickness, have not yet grounded their discussion of healing practices in a discussion of religion. The consequence of this oversight is that medical anthropological work often presents healing rituals in the context of religion as primitive and studies exhibit Western bias by failing to seriously consider the legitimacy of other cultural healing systems. For example, criticisms from anthropologists Carole Browner, Bernard Ortiz, and Arthur Rubel have pointed out that scholarly analyses of work on healing systems continuously portray these systems as “symbolic,” which significantly compromises their validity. Indeed, the underlying assumption of much medical anthropology is that the Western system of knowledge reflects the natural order. Since the clinical model understands disease as transcending social and cultural contexts, it follows then that medical knowledge has also been assumed to transcend these contexts. This assumption has been aided by the fact that scientific discoveries have come about as the result of repeated experimental efforts, and that medical science continues to progress, design effective therapies, map with increasing accuracy the human genome, and detail molecular and cellular pathways of disease. At the core however, medical science and its biological categories continue to be as contextual and as bounded by historicity as religious and indigenous healing rituals and practices. In fact, the language of clinical medicine, and science more broadly, is not a simple reflection of the empirical and natural word, but is rather, a language of culturally specific codes linked to a particular set of truths constructed by Western values. In this way, the language of medicine becomes a discourse of knowledge, to adapt the language of Michel Foucault. By contrast, the language of indigenous medicine becomes one of belief and even superstition. The refusal to concede as such reflects the Western bias present in much of medical anthropological work on systems of religious healing. In this thesis, I aim to bridge the current gap in scholarship as it relates to religious and indigenous healing practices. Rather than analyze specific healing processes, I instead choose to examine how healing rituals have constructed the categories of “the body” and “personhood.” These categories are critical in understanding cross-cultural differences in healing systems. Healing across both clinical medicine and indigenous medicine addresses illness through an understanding of the body and interacts with the patient through set of relations, such as healer-patient, or familial relations, which I term “personhood” in this thesis. In foregrounding of these categories, as they have been constructed in the Indian and Tanzanian context, I expand the understanding of these categories as they have been presented in clinical medicine, hopefully allowing for a more productive interface between clinical medicine and healing rituals in scholarship. Clinical medicine understands the body as primarily material, composed of skin, flesh, organ, and bone. In healing rituals, I argue, the body is understood more broadly, with material as well as non-material elements and as regulated by narrative, time, and place. With regard to personhood in these healing rituals, individuals retain autonomy of their health choices and personhood becomes reflected in the networks of interaction that an individual has with others. These broader definitions of the body and personhood are essential in moving forward to understand the foundations of healing in both healing rituals and clinical medicine. Previous scholarship on healing and illness has demonstrated the ways in which broadly, in indigenous healing rituals, the boundaries between “the individual and the community,” “the mind and the body,” and the “material and the spiritual” are permeable. These boundaries, in the clinical medicine context, are certainly more fixed. Moreover, healing in these rituals isolates the source of many illnesses as jealousy or witchcraft, which medical science often discredits. Importantly, healing rituals in both the contexts of India and Tanzania, which I will discuss below, have never been presented as alternatives to clinical medicine, but rather, coexist alongside it. While clinical medicine assumes that disease solely affects the isolated individual, healing in indigenous rituals frequently take into consideration the individual alongside familial relationships. For this reason, healing rituals that are performed on the individual may also be performed on close family members, who often take an active participating role as caretaker. In Tanzania, for example, medicinal baths aimed at protecting children from evil spirits known as mashetani, are commonly performed on the mother as well, highlighting the importance of the mother-child relationship.
- Date of publication
- spring 2018
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Kamath, Harshita
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Academic concentration
- Religious Studies
- Honors level
- Honors
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Graduation year
- 2018
- Language
- English
Relations
- Parents:
This work has no parents.
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