Next is the Introduction from the book:
Authors: Alfonso J. Aparicio & Francesco Di Ludovico
The different
ways of understanding well–being in every
culture/society are related with the content of their own customs. In
Mesoamerica,
people of the original traditions or the mestizos continue to perform their own
practices to prevent and cure health troubles.
In past
societies, as in the present ones, humans produced and built up systems and
ways to address health needs. The so–called «shamanism» has been, and still is,
a set of beliefs and worldviews based on the magical healing activity of a
religious and wise person, the «shaman». Jacques
Brosse summarizes that one of the main aims of this particular healer in
society is to cure the sickness.
According to the nosological thought of many aboriginal people, ill health
almost never has a primarily organic (physical–corporal) origin: it seems to be
caused by the insertion of a “harmful element” or the «loss of the soul». In this
way, the shaman will have the dual task of extracting the first element and getting
back the second one. Mircea Eliade emphasizes that one of the shaman’s missions
(talking about shamans in different cultures around the world) was to give
cohesion to the group, assuring it in every way. In the
interpretative study of researchers Jean Clottes and David Lewis–Williams about
the drawings, paintings and sculptures of the Palaeolithic caves, they suggest
the existence of shamans in prehistoric times.
As known from documentary
research (mainly Russian) carried out by Mircea Eliade about Asiatic and North–Asiatic
shamanism, that system, as well as therapeutic, would be a way of organizing
groups and communities in times when external menaces (natural, “supernatural” and
humans) did not only threaten the balance and well–being of individuals but
also the stability and integrity of their groups. For Antony Tao, inside the
Chinese archaic shamanism was born a speciality dedicated to therapy: the
healing shamanism, from the time when societies became sedentary (beginning of
the Neolithic Age, about 10,000 years ago). From this kind of shamanism would
come, later, the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Analogies with the
shamanism practiced in other Countries, though remote, are so obvious that some
people speak about it as a distinctive phenomenon of human mental structure
(therefore it is universal), or rather declare the existence of one place of
origin. From a strictly anthropological point of view, rather than defending
the universal paradigms, we defend the particularities and all the ways that
come from those cultures, which help explain the whole thing. We take into
consideration the universal exemplars as information. We consider the idea of
the same place of origin of shamanism, if we look around 180,000–200,000 years
ago. The “new” human beings (where everybody comes from) may dispose of an
original culture (in which we would include the structure of shamanism in all
its complexity); this cultural structure would transport the shamanic
organizational base worldwide. Mircea Eliade concludes that shamanism is a
basic element in all the spiritual traditions on Earth. In my book «Cultura tradicional de salud y etnomedicina
en Mesoamérica» I offer
explanations and analysis about this ancient phenomenon.
Until the arrival of
Europeans to America, Amerindian groups had different ways to cure, adapted to
their beliefs and their worldview. The chronicles of Indians reported the
characteristics of the world they found and discovered. Although they were
influenced by their origin, their Christian–European thinking and the
conditionings of the religious power imposed on them, they drew using words,
all the magnificence of those cultures, as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún did. In these
ethnographies, they related about healers and ways to cure; that is to say,
they recounted about an entire organization of local therapeutic procedures.
In the book of
chroniclers who speak of ethnomedicine there are valued features and relative
elements of natural healing resources (mostly derived from plants; but also,
minerals and animals). When Sahagún presents aspects of Aztec medicine, he
talks about good and bad doctors, not just referring to the responsibility and
the principles but also working methods and used sources. He is in the habit of
associating the unnatural being to witchcraft or cultural (religious)
symbolism, related to the calendar, the divination, local tradition, etc.
Anna Reid writes
about the Siberian shamanism pointing its slow recovery, similarly to other
parts of culture of North–Asiatic people after the end of the “Soviet Empire”.
Siberian shamans and ethnodoctors (traditional medicine–men) suffered because
of the advance of Tsarist Russia to the East; and again suffered when the
Soviet system was imposed on native Siberians, an order based in a materialist
culture of productive base.
Ancient systems as
shamanism, covered not only the health organization in the communities but also
other organizations such as “political” or “economic” but linked to
environmental balance and traditions, which did not match with those systems
that came much later such as capitalism or communism. Capitalism and communism
have a common pillar inside their communicative constructions: science (meaning,
anthropologically, as the cultural achievement of the “Western society”, not as
“the logical order” where the whole civilization would have been, sooner or
later, part of it, even if they did not have the experience of the previous
ones). For that reason, shamanism and other cultural and organizational systems
are coming into serious danger of extinction in the global world that has a
Western cultural and organizational system. These are ways of living that do
not match; and if they still exist it is because of the protectoral policies
and measures in the different Countries where they are legislated. In other
cases involved, there are “insignificant” and isolated minorities, and they can
even be exploited as exotic (and economic) targets for tourism or for a certain
type of tourism.
As
it happened in other parts of the world, Western Europe has followed its own path of development and progress. The rise of science was possible due to sociological and cultural reasons.
Antony Tao states that the Greeks understood the universe as a whole world ordered by laws that humans were able to decipher and understand. The
chemist Albert Hofmann remembers that Friedrich Nietzsche believed that what characterized the Greek mind from the beginning was the separate awareness of reality. Greece was the cradle of a worldview where the
“self” felt separated from the
external environment. Here, well ahead of other cultural areas, it was formed by the separation between the individual and the world. This duality, described by the physician and
writer Gottfried Benn as «neurotic European destiny»,
has characterized a crucial European intellectual history and today it plays a decisive
role. An ego that sees the world
as external to himself, like an object; and this
awareness, that makes reality an external element, has been the premise for the birth of Western
science. In the
early scientific works, the Greek cosmological theories
of pre–Socratic philosophers, worked
this objectificant view of reality. The men’s position against nature,
which had a strong grip on it, was clearly formulated and
philosophically founded for the first
time by Descartes in the
seventeenth century. Then in Europe
there had been a type of research
about nature, to objectify and measure it: this
kind of investigation has permitted us to formulate scientific and chemical laws of the structure
of material world. That knowledge has made possible a previously unimaginable exploitation of nature and its forces. The current technological development and industrialization is derived from it in almost
every aspect of life, offering
to a segment of humanity an unexpected
comfort and convenience. But, at the
same time, it was the beginning of a systematic destruction of
the natural environment. The damages caused by materialistic views of
the world were more serious than the material damages themselves. The human had lost the
link with the spiritual foundation of all divine beings.
Unprotected, insecure and isolated,
man faced only a lifeless
environment, materialistic, chaotic and
threatening. The germ of this
dualistic view of reality began
in the days of ancient Greece.
From
the elated Dionysian context arose the wisdom, that is the knowledge of the arcane and unfathomable. The
wise (“the person who knows”)
was not, in fact, the cult writer or the speech
teller, but rather the mage/shaman,
able to take a look, enlightening them, the darkness and mystery of the subtle “essences”. Thanks to his own surrender to nature, he became able to look into ineffable things, and then ready for
screening it in order to tell it then,
in human terms. Philosophy was originated by such
conceived wisdom. From the Platonic “ideas” and the poetics of uncertainty, to the investigative analysis
and Aristotelian rationality.
Then, that “love for wisdom”, once only doctrinal
lucubration, was mixed in early Christian–religious thought, but nevertheless
this remained free of Hermetic influences or
Gnostic ones.
Christianity,
as Judaism, joined this cultural base, founded on the belief in a transcendent
God, separated from nature. In fact, the Church took the
biblical tradition of a demiurgic
deity, masculine creator, single and separated from His creatures, and perpetuated the dualistic and mechanistic conception born in Hellenic
viewpoint; it proposed again the
dichotomous Manichean pattern of good/evil, human/God, mind/matter,
man/mind and divinity/matter. Given that one of the fundamental principles of dogmatic
and monotheistic Christianity is the
inscrutability of the divine nature,
highlighting its trascendency and
denying its immanency, it is understandable that this religion from the beginning has been
hostile to each ecstatic
condition not mediated by academically religious representatives.
The divine was displaced to Heaven and the pantheism
was execrated, nature was feared
and magic practice was stigmatized.
Afterwards,
in European cultures, nature was free
of bonds and spiritual connections, ready to be studied by a no divinity–mediated thought. Nature became
the object of careful study and
“vivisection”. In the Middle–ages they started,
although slowly and
timidly, to use techniques
and means to liberate the
hidden forces of the Higher
Powers, reporting to the Earth their sublime voice.
This trend was expressed and tested in the Renaissance age.
Then Enlightenment came and afterwards
the Industrial Revolution. Europe became
strong. The leading groups and
the holders of money focused their interests, as in his time did the Crown of Castile,
to other parts of the world. They found different people: people who did not speak like them, people
that did not think like them, who
did not see things as they did, they did not understand the disease and did not
cure them as they did. As well as the Spanish did in America,
other European Countries also imposed
their powerful relationships to the new societies.
Science,
as a part of European culture,
has been taken as a model of progress (evolution). Most of the positivist scientists have considered a single line of human advancement in the world: theirs. It has been seen that people from other nations in a stage of development, labeled, even by some
scientists as “wild people”. As in Europe, specifically
Greece, in early Christianity,
they demolished the temples of the pagan
Mysteries (among them
the best known are those of Delphi and Eleusis). A few centuries later, in the newly discovered America the same solicitous
Christians destroyed the secret rites of the natives to finish those cults which
gave way straight to the soul and the sacred. Nowadays,
there has been created between the
Western people, a sense of superiority
based on those ideas. Roberto
Fedeli tells us that
epistemology teaches, and the history of science confirms, that whenever a man turns
his gaze around himself, he manages
to see only isolated parts
of an indefinite whole universe; we can
know the parts, called «essences» by
philosophers, only if we surrender totally to life and nature. The myth says that
when God drove humans out of Paradise, He told them to subdue the world, and
they could do so only by knowing the mechanisms of operation, attaching
importance to the components, thus saying goodbye to essences. Then man learned
that some parts had to be connected to others, so they could come up with
something, not real but meaningful. Thus the history of science tells us how,
time after time, the rational field, has always changed its own characteristics
and forms. Thomas Kuhn has spoken of «paradigm», that is a shared value system
that helps give meaning and shape to a set of data obtained from empirical
observation. The psychodysleptic molecules of hallucinogenic plants, for
example, have caused great anger to the austere method of science, so skilled
in “dissection” but unaware about the “essences”.
Medicine has become scientific and, therefore,
the “best” model. However, anthropologists such as Malinowski,
Franz Boas or Clifford Geertz have assessed the original contribution of members from different cultures. In order to know
something about someone it is necessary not only to observe him, but we need
also to listen to him. If we want to know another culture, as well as observing it and analyzing
it from our point of view (outside
it), it is necessary that the culture
itself is explained by its protagonists.
Amerindian and Asian traditional medicines “say” that to understand what happens to a patient we should allow him to speak about his illness, and the experience gained through this situation. Edward Bach said something like that. In fact, the medical history that a shaman/healer collects from the
patients is well aware of the
psychic aspect of their ailments even
if they are referred to as purely
physical. But sometimes the dialogue becomes difficult; the symptoms described
are vague or symbolic, rare,
strangely acute or incomprehensibly
chronic. In these cases the shaman
suspects a “magical” (or an insertion of magic) origin of the illness. Often he
will consume preparations of entheogenic plants (“hallucinogens”), so that,
under a condition of altered consciousness, “divine” visions (interpreted as
ecstatic contemplations) suggest to him the cause or discomfort in the
“worldly” regions where for a time his spirit lives, so that he can recover the
patient’s “lost soul”. This treatment must be interpreted according to the
Amerindian worldview and not according to the Western one. We can take the
important value of this mystical experience of unity (the unio mystica, which is to know the divinity and realize that is,
from a monistic perspective, One–and–All), because it could be directed to the
care of mankind spiritually sick of a partial view, rational–materialist of the
world. Because of the overcoming of the dualistic worldview, with the
“dissolution of ego” (which means knowing oneself intimately, the spirit, and
finally understanding having a sacred nature) would be the foundation of
healing and spiritual renewal of Western culture.
Each ethnomedicine is
located in a unique cultural context. Two lines of a cultural progress will
never naturally converge at all, if no one handles them in order to make this
possible. Science arose in Europe as an own fact for the European evolutionary
path. But other people (Native Americans, Asians, Africans) had no Greek
culture, or Christianity, or Judaism, or Renaissance, or the French
Enlightenment. That did (and does) not mean they were (or are) worth less than
Europeans or Western people. It is a clear political issue.
The Polo brothers narrated
wonders of progress in Asia when Europe was still living in the Middle–ages. The
chroniclers of the Indias, intelligent and sensitive men of the time, were
“astonished” when they beheld the amplitude of the cultures of the conquered
people in America. It was Colonialism (speaking of Western Colonialism in
general, not just the Iberian one) that broke the balanced development of
non–Western people. It was that Colonialism which changed the course of
socio–cultural evolution lines of non–Western people. It was the same Colonialism
that produced the differences which generated an “inferiority complex” on a
large scale (among submitted peoples) while enhancing the colonizers’ cultural
egos. The so–called «Third
World» is an idiomatic expression coined by the dominant Western culture. It is a
saying of gradation. The First World is the rich world,
therefore, superior, because it has power
and money. The Second World is a
hybrid half–developed, “bad
sitting between two chairs”. The Third World is the one of the “miserable people” (a term with many interpretations, depending on the optical
approach to understanding). Poverty, disease, hunger and all evils suffered by men,
women and children of the “Third World” emerged after the human groups living in them ancient times were
invaded and submitted by humans
from faraway lands. These conditions
should not be, then, specifically
cultural, historical and organizational
but differ from those that led to the
European scientific revolution.
Nowadays, in general, they continue to give “help” to
the Third World: welfare, that is an “assistance”
volunteered by NGO’s, religious organizations and State agencies.
Aid according to the opinion of
many members of ethnic groups are unproductive, barren and unable to meet the organization of groups and indigenous people. Members
of these societies wish:
– 1) to be respected
and to be taken into consideration.
– 2) if aid is
offered, this must be assessed, validated and managed from the local
organizations themselves.
– 3) National Western
health specialists have to be complemented by local specialists and
ethnomedical people. Sometimes, they say: white
people arrive with their ideas, their medicines and food for us, this, makes a
huge difference between us and them.
South
American Mapuches, Mayans from Chiapas, or Zapotec,
Mixes, and Chatinos from Oaxaca would like to continue
their self–organization, sharing with
other groups and nations a design for a
future in a plural, multicultural
and peaceful society. For many it is
like the imposition of force, the laws of others, the national education, the government health
facilities and their medicines.
No local groups helped them make such a development. There was no agreement. Native people
say that everything that is decided should be the result of dialogue and
compromise.
When Native Americans suffered the restructuring of their societies from the fifteenth century; when new institutions imposed an order imported from Europe, then, the decay of the original
groups began, away from the safe havens of their traditional organizations. Years and centuries passed in America. The union of the Spanish and American people created
a new society, mixed, half–blooded,
that was the confluence of two distinct
cultural and human sources.
This society was developed in urban areas, producing a kind of
mixed ethnomedicine (such as the one
we find today in
the Sonora market in Mexico City). This
culture of health is already a tradition in America. Moreover,
the modified indigenous groups continued
their relatively original development
in areas outside the cities,
keeping with varying degrees of acculturation of their
own therapeutic systems.
The
conquest of Mesoamerica not only
established the end of the Aztec State,
at a political, social, organizational, ideological level, but also marked the end of cultural production and recording of knowledge directly related to daily life and traditions under natural
life and daily life of the Aztecs.
Right
from that moment reminiscence and ideas will be collected and written. New
experiences will be recorded, all within a new context constituted by the rulers and the ruled. This situation will affect native people and their life experiences, marked by the need of
adjustment to new circumstances, the assimilation
of them and the constant fear of the “white men”. Far from urban centers,
in rural areas that are difficult to access, the ancient
traditions will potentially survive. They were,
unintentionally, favored by the Catholic
religious system itself, because
of its organization and structure, this situation indirectly contributed to the salvation of
those traditions, most of them came to our days in the
linkage of the word handed down
from generation to generation.
The Castilian–Spanish invasion had very negative consequences for Native Americans. However, the arrival of Europeans in the American land
brought, at times, its positive cultural
and material contribution. Appreciating many of the therapeutic powers of endemic plants and minerals, the
most conciliatory conquerors encouraged the use of them. Therefore, the acculturative process if just in a part disapproved the
use of resources considered evil by
some Hispanic puritanicals,
on the other hand it allowed the
continued use of many others
in Mexico: curative plants with the same
applications they had in ancient
times, as well as many Iberian
medicinal herbs (like Sage, Rue, Chamomile and Rosemary) were exported.
Today
the healing arts in Mexico are constituted by the summation of medical concepts of Old
and New Worlds. An anthropologically fascinating example of
it is the comprehensive tool,
called «paraphernalia»,
the healer/shaman will get when visiting
a patient; praying, he will place neatly on a
colorful blanket: a set of
wild herbs, candles and incense,
crystals, shells and palm leaves, agave
liquors, sacred images of virtuous
pagans and Christian effigies, eagle
feathers, scented oils and rain water, colognes, paper butterflies and colored ribbons.
The
world we live in today presents
another type of “colonialism” if we want to call it that, which is characterized by the
substitution, super–position
of leading ideas. Western culture imposes (its ideals, icons and commercial advertising, music...), through the phenomenon of globalization
and internationalization, its powerful
and moving displays dominate, winning in all societies, imposing in local cultures, replacing (at worst)
or mixing with them (at best). Traditional medicines are medicines that emerged in societies and cultures with their own and differentiated traits, successfully used by members of these societies.
Representatives of medical anthropology such as Robert Hahn, Arthur Kleinman, Peter Brown and Byron Good
understand that health and disease
cannot be separated from their cultural contexts; and
that therapeutic systems, traditional
medical practices and modes of
healing are the result of the
adequacy of the attention to
these contexts. When we talk
about ideas of health/illness
within the Mesoamerican society,
we refer to representations of those
facts in the minds of individuals and their community. We cannot make the mistake of applying our thinking and the organization of our thoughts to people who not only are
geographically far from us (Western
people) on a cultural level but also on a historical one. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán writes,
referring to the Aztecs: This
medicine, essentially
mystical, was described by the
colonial religious as superstition and prelogical
by the early twentieth century
positivists. By classifying each
other made explicable rationalizations in subjects who judged the
phenomena of Indigenous culture, from
the base of Western cultural ideas
and values, but they are not right just
because of it. Medicine considered from the point of view of
its same context, accomplished the
mission to reduce anxiety in the group itself and offer security
and consistency. That was its
specific role; anything more was just extra.
The Westernization of the world is a palpable fact. The
extension of Western scientific medicine
makes possible that many problems
(understood within a global cultural context) can be addressed and solved, but not all of them. Some sicknesses as the «susto» or «Mapuche
kutran» (special infirmity, specifically understandable in the Mapuche ethnic context, South America) they are diseases of indigenous nosology. «Qi’s
block liver–gallbladder» is a syndrome defined in TCM as not necessarily coincident with a universally
recognizable illness according to
Western science. Methods of healing as the
«limpia» (Native American cultures) act
differently in favor of the sick person from what pills do (in patented medicine). In both cases, the
source and the way of healing fit to the patient’s socio–cultural context, to understand the disease (for him and the doctor), and how to counteract it. Means of treatment such as acupuncture (TCM) are not understood in its true dimension if
they are studied from different
perspectives from the ones forming their original context. Judging acupuncture from another cultural position (ex., scientific),
necessarily implies comparison. Considering
that the starting position of the
study, such as scientific, as the
“truth”, not understanding acupuncture in its original context, it will be only
understood as a stimulating practice for a defensive reaction; it could be judged as a placebo. A “new” acupuncture will be discovered, an acupuncture different from its original context. And it will have made a genuine exercise of ethnocentrism. According to Geertz, we
think it is opportune to approach the object we want to talk about. This implies, inevitably, moving out of “our center”, going to know the object in its place, acknowledging it. It is a basic exercise in
anthropology; and is a practice recommended in anthropology to any
researcher (natural scientist or
social scientist). So we understand that acupuncture or a Mesoamerican limpia have meanings related to their socio–historical and cultural contexts.
The Amerindian limpia and other
ethnomedical procedures mean something beyond our own significant (exotic) projection, made from “our center”. If we get out from there,
we will be free from an uncomfortable and outdated static position of observation, as well as the ethnocentric view, inadmissible in these times for any
respectable researcher or cultural–scientific popularizer.
Traditional medicines
can be practiced alone or can be combined with each–other and also with
scientific medicine. There may be cooperation between practitioners of both.
Systems can also become original therapeutics inside intercultural systems when
those who know and practice them tailored them to the specific people’s circumstances
and their problems (related to the natural–biological, social and cultural). In
the future we could have:
a) A large global
culture with varying cultural aspects that has been encountered along the way.
b) A multicultural
international society (with a clear dominance of Western culture).
c) A society
characterized by multiculturalism.
d) A vague dynamic
characterized by a permanent change of the cultural fact.
In
the meantime, traditional ethnomedicines are practiced; in fact, Mexican
institutions preserved them as a part of an indigenous culture. Some Mexican
States (like Morelos, Nuevo León) recognize them as health laws; some others
give them similar characterization (Oaxaca, Chiapas).
In China, in a large part of Asia and in a number of Countries in the world the TCM is successfully used. In
India and Sri Lanka, Ayurvedic
medicine is used. In other areas
of the world there are still living
forms of healing perfectly
valid in their context and out of
them; in the same range as conventional Western medicine (the most widespread in the world).
As intercultural
medicine (adapted by professionals and ethnodoctors from different cultural
contexts) the most widely–known is Chinese medicine. But the dissemination of
knowledge and its distribution by the originating ethnomedical world are making
known the traditional medical practices as important as those of Mexican
indigenous groups (the use of temazcal, the
herbology and limpias) or South
American ones (herbology, limpias,
etc.).
The
investigation about the limpia
corresponds to a part of
my doctoral thesis research, conducted in different parts of the Mexican States of México
and Oaxaca in 2004, 2005 and 2006. In this
investigation I have added the contributions of the Italian physician and
Ethnobotany researcher Francesco Di
Ludovico, who is also familiar with
these places as well as the herbalism of the ethnic
groups that live there.
Cf. C. Geertz, a) La
interpretación de las culturas; b) “Descripción densa: hacia una teoría
interpretativa”, in: P. Bohannan, M.
Glazer, Antropología, lecturas.
