Medical Pluralism Among the Yangoru Boiken

Abstract

Some fifty years ago, the Boiken of the Yangoru subdistrict in the East Sepik province first became aware that Europeans had different means from their own of curing the sick. In the years that followed, their growing acquaintance with this system prompted an increasing use of its novel therapies and significant modifications in traditional understandings of sickness. This chapter examines the ethnography of this medically plural situation. It begins with a brief history of Western health services in this small corner of Papua New Guinea and an outline of their main biomedical effects. Against this historical backdrop, the body of the work then attempts to identify the major influences of Western health services on traditional medicine and to trace out the implications of this interaction for contemporary health-seeking behavior. The chapter ends with a brief assessment of the sociocultural implications of Western medicine and suggests how Yangoru’s health services might sensitively be expanded.