Therapeutic efficacy and consensus among the Aluund of south-western Zaire

Abstract

AbstractThis article reconsiders John Janzen's notions of social consensus and therapeutic efficacy within a pluralistic medical framework, and combines a semantic and praxeological approach to an extended case of affliction: that of a group and its leaders being confronted with sickness and death and reacting through health-seeking strategies. First, it is argued that an understanding of representations of aetiology and their management necessitates an expansion of a narrow sociological and restorative view of the therapy management group into a broader multidimensional knowledge of the dynamics out of which the conflict or problem originated, as well as of the mode of action upon the sufferer. The possible lack of social consensus among the members of the kin diagnostic group does not imply that the therapy should be ineffective. Rather, therapeutic ritual is viewed as performative event or processual action, which realises itself through its temporal unfolding, in a creative process of meaning production which pragmatically achieves the ritual's aim.