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Healing and the cultural order: the case of the Barolong boo Ratshidi of southern Africa
Author(s) -
COMAROFF JEAN
Publication year - 1980
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1980.7.4.02a00030
Subject(s) - dialectic , sociology , sociocultural evolution , context (archaeology) , indigenous , the symbolic , aesthetics , phenomenology (philosophy) , social psychology , epistemology , perception , psychology , anthropology , psychoanalysis , history , philosophy , ecology , archaeology , biology
Healing reveals clearly both the dialectical relationship between the cultural order and subjective experience and the role of this dialectic in wider processes of continuity and change. This examination of one southern Africa therapeutic system is set in the context of a more general debate between formalist and phenomenological interpretations of ritual and cosmology. It examines the relationship between shared symbolic categories and the indigenous perceptions of order and disorder, suggesting that affliction here is a structurally configured dislocation of the self and its social and cosmic context. Healing thus entails the manipulation of multivocal symbolic media, seeking to reintegrate the physical, conceptual, and social universe of sufferers and community. In rapidly changing societies, healing reveals how existing symbolic categories subsume chaotic experience and also how perceptions of an expanding sociocultural domain may transform these categories themselves, [healing, change, Africa, cosmology, self and society. Western allopathic medicine]