1 - The dialectics of healing power

Summary

Overview of book

People who fall ill must choose between multiple and competing systems of healing: this is true both in the small-scale communities where anthropologists usually work and in the urban centers of post-industrial society. There are very few settings which offer only one way to conceive of the body and its suffering, or where people have recourse to only one brand of treatment. In the pragmatic quest for therapy, people routinely combine elements from diverse or even contradictory medical traditions. Moreover, the practice of healers – both their actual therapies and their authoritative conceptions of health and disease – typically contains hybrid elements, borrowed from other traditions and grafted onto their own. This book examines these contests for healing power across the history of Haiti and in people's lives from a single rural community in the late 1980s.

The book explores the struggles for healing power in the context of religious and medical pluralism in Haiti. The seemingly stable array of religions and medical traditions in rural Haiti is deceptive. There is, in fact, a continual struggle over the effectiveness, political potential, and moral meanings of healing power. This struggle both reproduces and destabilizes the conventional categories of healing practices and religious identities. Part I traces the history and ethnography of metropolitan medicine (contemporary Euro-American biomedicine and its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors). Control of Euro-American medicine has always articulated with strategies of political rule. Nonetheless, the relatively powerless have often appropriated the resources and prestige associated with official medical services as a form of oblique resistance.