Essay on ’shamanic healing’. To what extent are illness culturally determined?
Introduction
Illness is a word. The physical significations to which we attach the word would go unheard; we would suffer in silence, unless we had the ability to call forth a name and bring these physical conditions into the social world. Thus, the latter question posed in the title has an implicit, problematic postulate. It assumes that we can work out the extent to which a category relies on objective, natural events and the extent to which it relies on cultural constructions. The existence of an empirical reality that a category like illness speaks about is not relevant to the nature of a category. All categories refer to a world (that which is signified). However, they only ever gain meaning as a constellation of signs in relation to other signs (Saussure: 1995: 12). Thus the category illness is always a socio-cultural category: gaining meaning when placed in the constellation of words such as health, and emerging, in each culture, within a specific historical trajectory. As the word illness is always culturally determined, what is determined as illness will necessarily be culturally determined.
