Des lieux de soins alternatifs où se construisent des altérités communes
(2012)
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- Abstract
- (en) The current study aims at examining the representations of diseases in urban healers and their patients in Russia, not only through semi-directed interviews but also with our own observations of the practices being used during the healing process. The surprising popularity of the use of alternative care in post-Soviet Russia has motivated us to inquiry about their functions within a society in socio-economical mutation and to study these practices in a larger social and historical context. The model of functional analysis of clinical practices (Steichen, 2000-2003) and the work of François Laplantine (1992) in the field of anthropology of illness and health, were used as a support to develop our grid for data analysis. The representations of diseases have been approached in order to show how the actors (patients and healers) define the figures of otherness. Illness, as it appears in the discourse of the actors is related to the dimensions of relationship between the individual and other human beings (more or less “familiar”) but also between the individual and the superhuman Others (God, the Cosmos, the Universe), and also with non-humans ("ghosts", "entities", "spirits") (Singleton, 1998). The description of the diseases called "traditional" (the "sglaz" -evil eye-, the "portcha" - sorcery-, the "proklyatiye" - curse -, the "ispoug" - fear- , the "vampirism", etc.) as they appeared to us in the discourse of the actors, have allowed us to uncover the different ways in which individuals consider the interactions with each other. We were able to notice that the patients and the healers favored the functional (relational) representations. However, the ontological etiology of the disorders remains present in the background (in varying proportions) and is made explicit through the reference to the concept of “energy”. The main causes of illnesses are attributed to punitive intervention of “positive higher forces”, to “evil spirits”, to the voluntary and involuntary interventions of others; and to the individual’s own behaviour. We found in the healers and patience’s representations the existence of several steps composing the treatment, each of these steps being based on a different therapeutic principle. Each treatment starts with purifying the body, followed by adding power, and leads to actions that intend to restore the balance of the patient's body as well as the balance between the patient and the environment. The subtractive and allopathic therapeutic representations coexist in both the healers and the patients with the additive representations which themselves belong to the homeopathic ritual. Some patients experience the last step of the treatment as adorcistic, that is, like an initiation which would allow them to become practitioners themselves. The etiological representations of the disease conceived by the actors require therapeutic responses which relate to specific domains, often rejected by the official medicine, namely: the relation to the sacred, the relationships with the social environment, and the connection to the self. The representations of the disease and of the treatment as they appear in the discourse of the healers and the discourse of their patients make it possible to study the issue of otherness in a different fashion than through the consultations of the scientific bio-medicine.
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Khaskelberg, M. (2012). Des lieux de soins alternatifs où se construisent des altérités communes. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/160332