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Anthropology · Chapter 12

Healers of the World

Every society has people it turns to when a body goes wrong — and almost none of them look like a doctor. Some are chosen by spirits through an illness they cannot refuse; others spend years memorising a corpus, or sit an examination. Some read illness as an agent — an ancestor, a rival, a broken observance. Others read it as an imbalance in humours, elements or fluids. Tap twelve specialists, then re-sort them to see which differences are real and which are only in the English words we use.

Nothing selected

How the role is entered — —
Called — chosen by a spirit or an illnessExamined — an office entered by credential
What is thought to cause illness — —
Personalistic — someone or something did thisNaturalistic — a balance has been lost
Sector of care — —
Folk — a specialist outside the licensed systemProfessional — organised, taught, licensed
Faint dots on each track are the other eleven healers, so you can see where the one you picked sits among them. The figures are schematic — they stand for a practice and its tools, not for any real person or ceremony.
Twelve ways to be a healertap a practitioner to begin
Before you startAnthropology treats every one of these as a medical system — a body of theory, a way of diagnosing, a trained practitioner and a public that believes in them. That includes the last one on the list. Arthur Kleinman’s point was that biomedicine is not the neutral yardstick the others are measured against; it is one ethnomedicine among many, with its own cosmology, its own rituals and its own long initiation.
Nobody uses only one. People move between systems, often in the same week — a clinic for the antibiotics, a healer for the reason it happened to them. Anthropologists call this medical pluralism, and the order in which a family tries the options is their hierarchy of resort. Cheapest and closest is usually first; the expensive specialist is usually last.