¿Esperando al doctor? Reflexiones sobre una investigación de antropología médica en México

Abstract

This article focuses on research in the field of medical anthropology conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) of Mexico. It discusses a set of theoretical and methodological issues pertaining particularly to the status of traditional medicine and the relations of reciprocity between anthropologist in the field and natives. The author stresses the difficulty in considering traditional medicine –in this case, in some indigenous communities of Mexico– as an unchanging set of homogeneous and coherent knowledge and practice. Traditional medicine in the field appears closely tied to the settings of everyday life, and it can only be observed in conjunction with the scarcities of medical health care and the poor economic and hygienic conditions of the population. Thus, the first or proper object of the medical anthropologist regard is not an abstract inventory or a systematic, structured repertoire of traditional beliefs and practices, but a heterogeneous, provisional and changing set of interpretations and actions displayed by people to confront suffering, pain and disease. A plurality of resources are intertwined in the local strategies for defending health, spanning the so-called traditional medicine –domestic medicine or the activities of traditional healers–to the practitioner in the Health Care Centre, and often even the anthropologists themselves when they have, as is the case here, a training in medicine. In the second part of the article the author presents, using ethnographic data, the vexed question of the efficacy of traditional medicine in relation to diseases such as enfado and vergüenza.