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Two ways of explaining reality: the sickness of a small boy of Papua New Guinea from anthropological and biomedical perspectives
Author(s) -
Keck Verena
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
oceania
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.356
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1834-4461
pISSN - 0029-8077
DOI - 10.1002/j.1834-4461.1993.tb02425.x
Subject(s) - new guinea , epistemology , ethnography , interpretation (philosophy) , focus (optics) , sociology , medical anthropology , anthropology , ethnology , philosophy , linguistics , physics , optics
Cultural anthropologists and biomedical physicians do not work together as often as they should. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the advantages of such a concerted effort. After briefly clarifying the author's own point of view and giving an ethnographic description of the Yupno people and their medical system, the focus will be the case of sickness of a small boy, presented from two perspectives, biomedical and medical anthropological. Typical Yupno concepts of illness will not be correlated with biomedical classifications. The two kinds of interpretation of the same sickness will be presented as two independent models of explanation. By this means, an attempt is made to avoid the approach often taken in medical anthropological studies: even though a native medical system is being described, it is at the same time more or less explained in terms of a biomedical system of reference as well as measured and evaluated against it.