Critical Response: Zambia Struggles with the Power of Witch Doctors
“Zambia Struggles with the Power of Witch Doctors” by John Vidal (2005) interprets the correlation between Zambia’s local healers and the AIDS epidemic, defining them as the cause and the effect respectively. Many of Vidal’s points can be practically applicable in the healing process of Zambia, however in this process it is reductive of all non-biomedical healing present and Zambia’s culture as a whole, defining it as inherently maladaptive to the objective good of western medicine. The current paradigms, social schemas, and western dogmas bleeding into the contemporary milieu make perspectives such as these to be deemed axiomatic and seemingly ubiquitous, as it blithely contributes to the tractability of detournement of all non-western mechanisms and cultures.
It can be acquiesced that what Vidal has brought up may currently be the most scientifically sound approach specific to some members of Zambia’s healthcosm, however, the narrative it pushes is of western biomedical supremacy. Vidal and actors within the biomedical system are not malicious nor consciously upholding colonial ends. They are trapped within the social milieu produced by ideas of naturalism that biomedicine by definition has substantiated itself within. Within the western social fabric that has been woven by biomedicine, this is by deterministic causality all that can be done currently.
The first paragraph of the article starts with a man suffering from HIV as a consequence of witch doctors in his village. As Vidal writes, “he went to 15 local witchdoctors who all told him he had been possessed. One said he had a snake in his body drinking his blood, another that he had been inhabited by a ghost, a third that he had been bewitched by jealous neighbors. They took his money, washed his evil spirits away, exorcised him and gave him roots and powders. But he got progressively weaker until, he said, by early this year he could not even walk,”(Vidal, 2005, 1). The article uses the man as an exemplar, further substantiating that his life was only saved by western medicine once he escaped the avaricious snake oil drenched grasp of the Zambian witch doctors. Vidal presents the biomedicine provided as the objectively true approach to how the epidemic and health in general should be handled. Even a witch doctor deems biomedicine to be the correct approach to later stages of the illness. This narrative reduces the real health benefits that witch doctors provide not only to individuals but to communities as a whole. Vidal somewhat alludes to this, writing that “Western and traditional medicine in Zambia are culturally miles apart, but both camps agree that attitudes to sex, health, wealth and death have helped HIV to spread,”(2). However this point turns maladaptive when the logical conclusion this has been forced to pivot to is that cooperation must be fostered between the assumed universal objective biomedicine and the subjective traditional medicine. At best this proposes an amalgamation of the two and at worst and most probable the establishment of a medical and social hegemony.
As Victor W. Turner (1967) outlines, a witch doctor’s role in the social micro- and macrocosm of both private and public health vastly differs from the role of a doctor in biomedicine. In contrast to the healing Vidal’s article is exemplifying, witch doctors act as social mediators, at times healing whole communities and root causes instead of diagnosis and substrate solutions. The difference in approach lies in the definition of the relationship between the endogenic and the exogenous variables of the patient. Although AIDS and HIV are known as ‘umukola’, the difference in approach to the individual is the freedom from the imposing paradigm of western diagnosis. As Charles E. Rosenberg (2007) outlines, diagnosis reduces the individual to a paradoxical state, in which illness is purely an exogenic entity infecting an individual on an endogenic level, resulting in the besmirching of the entire ontological status of the individual. The witch doctor’s immersion into the very same social and physical milieu of their patients makes way for a phenomenological understanding surpassing anything possible in western medicine’s systemic approach. The witch doctor is not just a cultural barrier that must be overcome and manipulated by western forces to better ease the population into a biomedically certified workforce.
Unfortunately, this is the article’s perspective, in alignment with the role anthropologists had in medicine at the time the article was written. That anthropologists shall only be the quellers of the maladaptive roadblock that culture substantiates. That anthropologists shall be the demolishers of any intellectual labor outside the western paradigm, as anything exogenous to this structure must be and only be subjectively misguided, with what is endogenous to the structure being what is natural. The elimination of independent local intellectual labor is a means through which neo-colonialism may take root, and as a result and out of necessity, biomedicine extends its reach through the ideology of naturalism. As Deborah Gordon (1988) elucidates, biomedicine uses naturalism to axiomatically place itself at the top of the seeming objective hegemony of healing. Biomedicine declares–and through the mechanisms of naturalism defines–any other mechanism of healing as a maladaptive predecessor to itself. Biomedicine views and places itself as a self-actualizing entity determined to come about within the natural state of the world. Biomedicine substantiates this through the lack of internal critique of itself, deeming all other forms of healing to be rooted in maladaptive customs and cultures, and biomedicine to be rooted in the natural, or tabula rasa. However, tabula rasa does not exist, and with biomedicine following all the orders of metaphysics along with everything else, it is inherently oriented. This is to say that biomedicine is not free from culture or what has been deemed to be the subjective.
What naturalism asserts and gives to biomedicine is that biomedicine is of the objectively correct or natural orientation, and that all else is askew. Vidal substantiates this idea that all witch doctor treatments are inherently maladaptive skewings of biomedicine, as the article operates on the foundation and assumption that witchcraft is ridiculous, something not rooted in natural phenomena. However, the schemas associated with witchcraft in the west vastly differ the role witchcraft actually plays within its community. As E.E. Evans Pritchard (1937) explains, witchcraft occupies the taxonomy of unexplainable or unfortunate events in contrast to the western’s perception of the supernatural. To greatly simplify in order to practically translate the cultural paradigm, in these communities witchcraft goes hand in hand with the phenomena of the natural world, and simply categorizes it based on what may be in the hands of the individual, and what may ought to be in the hands of the witch doctor or the other.
The key actors in biomedicine acquiesce that witch doctors have a great influence among the populations they inhabit, but it is framed more as an inhibition of the natural healthy order of things, rather than accepting the reasons as to why witch doctors hold this great influence. Vidal notes that the epidemic has gone viral due to differing lifestyles, such as polygamy, all results of what has been framed as a maladaptive culture. Paradoxically, Vidal does not go any further than simply addressing the culture as a relevant vector to the epidemic, as he is trapped by the very paradigm that biomedicine has enveloped the western world within. Biomedicine offers no macrocosmic systemic solution to the epidemic other than mass medicine and abstract information. They hope that this information may enact a change in the way the people behave themselves, however they may not impose onto the culture as it would be colonial.
The biomedical work being done in Zambia to combat the epidemic is not done by people with consciously malicious or colonial goals. The actors in biomedicine are trapped within the social paradigm established by the phantom of colonialism (not to say that colonialism is dead). The doctors wish to help but cannot as the tool and schema of biomedicine is too asphyxiating to its wielder. The arm with which they grasp will inherently never reach Zambia without ethical disaster. There is no way in which to manipulate biomedicine without it not being biomedicine, without it not exiting the realm of naturalism. The helping hand they extend will always be of the white man's burden, and only impose a hegemony of the sophisticated objectively right giver and subjective maladaptive culturalist upon all that it touches.
The article and biomedicine as a whole are substantiated on the hegemony and establishment of seeming objective truth that will never allow for western medicine to not enter an ethical predicament. This established hierarchy is what it means to be biomedical.
To be biomedical is to assert the paradoxical relationship and false dichotomy between the exogenic and the endogenic in relation to physiology, ontology, and all phenomena. To give a praxis, what may be done is to support narratives outside those of biomedicine to wake the actors within biomedical discourse of the dogmatic slumber they reside and turmoil within. To hope that once it is accepted that by metaphysical definition that biomedicine is inherently orientated, it may allow for more neo-orientations better fit to help communities within epidemics. However currently, the narrative outline in this article back in 2005 still remains an exemplar of a contemporary western perspective.
References
Vidal, John. 2005. “Zambia Struggles with the power of witch doctors”. The Guardian.
Rosenberg, Charles. 2002. "The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experience." The Milbank Quarterly 80(2): 237-260.
Turner, Victor. 1964. "A Ndembu Doctor in Practice." In Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, edited by John Middleton and E.H. Winter, 205-224. London: Routledge.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. "The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events." In Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, 63-83. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gordon, Deborah. 1988. "Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine." In Biomedicine Examined, edited by Margaret Lock and Deborah Gordon, 19-56. Dordrecht: Springer.