bad blood, spoiled milk: bodily fluids as moral barometers in rural Haiti

Abstract

Move san, an illness widespread among rural Haitian women, might be described as a somatically experienced disorder caused by emotional distress. When it occurs in pregnant women or nursing mothers, move san causes breastmilk to “spoil,” in which case an herbal treatment is likely to be sought. Case material is presented that suggests that bad blood and spoiled milk serve as moral barometers that submit “private” problems (abuse of women, especially pregnant or nursing ones) to public scrutiny. Although more than one analytic model is considered here, it is argued that move san is best understood as a disorder of experience in which the stories told by sufferers, and by their consociates, play a key role in the shaping of that experience. By attending closely to the way in which illness (and other misfortune) is worked into the narrative renderings of broader experience, anthropologists may be better able to avoid the Cartesian dualism that still marks much medical anthropology. [Haiti, illness narrative, bodily fluids, Cartesian dualism, interpretive anthropology]

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