Primitive Yet Contemporary: Matrices of Meaning

Anthropology embodies the concept of culture, a concept that is ever expanding as it includes all the material and intellectual products of human endeavor. It encompasses systems of thought and of investigation, systems which in turn, influence and shape each other. Thus, thinking about “scientific evidence” and the law convinced us that our approach had to be an anthropological one. In pursuit of understanding cultural differences and biological determinants of human behavior (the so-called Nature/Nurture controversy), anthropologists have constructed a discipline which has become a mosaic of sub-disciplines, and the resulting specialization has led to considerable progress. Medical Anthropology is now a well-established sub-discipline, and will provide a framework for our inquiry.

From describing and analyzing other cultural systems of curing and healing, anthropologists went on to study the dynamics of patient choice in a situation where two or more cultural systems interact (Romanucci-Ross 1969). This led to cultural self-reflection and to studies of various aspects of our own medical system (e.g. Katz 1981, 1999; Lock and Gordon; Kleinman; Trostle), as well as to our medical system within the new context of globalization (Sinha). Medical discourse also has been analyzed in anthropological studies that deal with the relationship between linguistics and power (Kuipers 1989; Foucault 1972, 1973); ecological adaptation (McElroy and Townsend); medicinal plants (Moerman; Etkin); nutrition (Bogin); transcultural psychiatry (Devereux; Tancredi; Kleinman); and some of these fields have now become established as separate sub-disciplines; (for an overview see Romanucci-Ross, Moerman and Tancredi 1997). Some research has been done by anthropologists on systems of law in simpler cultures (Melton; Nader). These and similar studies have been important, for, in such cultures, legal systems (rules of conduct) rest heavily on ethical codes and sometimes “over express” these codes.