Some Implications of Medical Beliefs and Practices for Social Anthropology

Abstract

A people's medical beliefs and practices persist because they answer instrumental and moral imperatives, and they are empirically effective. This is not the same thing as saying that they are effective from the standpoint of Western medical notions or that they always bring the results for which people hope. The empirical effectiveness of these practices has important ontological consequences, since it enables sickness episodes to communicate and confirm ideas about the real world.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 231 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.