Abstract
This chapter examines how the ethnographic configuration of plague was based on a medical materialist rendition of Mongolian mythology into information about plague and its prevention. With a focus on myths regarding the human origins of marmots (one of plague’s main hosts on the north-east Chinese-Russian frontier), and their relation to local beliefs regarding shape-shifting, Mary Douglas’s anthropological critique is employed so as to examine how these were explained as a mere veil of native knowledge regarding plague. Stressing how ethnographic data on Mongol myths and understandings of affliction that did not fit this interpretive framework were systematically excluded from the ethnomedical narrative on native knowledge, it is argued that such medical materialist readings of non-Western mythology impair native epistemological autonomy, reducing all social and cultural life into a struggle for survival.
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Lynteris, C. (2016). Medical Myths and Mythic Medicine. In: Ethnographic Plague. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59685-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59685-7_3
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