Kruiedokters, plants and molecules : relations of power, wind, and matter in Namaqualand

Cohen, Joshua B

Kruiedokters, plants and molecules : relations of power, wind, and matter in Namaqualand

Doctoral Thesis

2015

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Social Anthropology

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This thesis was born out of the post-Mbeki era and the prevailing, tense relationship between 'traditional' healing and biomedical science in South Africa. Attempting to imagine this relationship differently, and as part of an interdisciplinary project, it is based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork centring round villages in the Kamiesberg municipality, Namaqualand. Part of the project involved molecular biologists seeking bioactive compounds in locally growing plants. Many of these species were also used by local kruiedokters (herbdoctors), with two of whom, 'Koos' and 'John', the author spent a large proportion of his research time. The thesis addresses the following constructivist questions: what kinds of realities are being done as kruiedokters and molecular biologists work in their own ways with plants? How might these realities - and the similarities and differences between them - be researched, understood and described in ways that rely neither on absolute relativism, nor on one kind of reality trumping all others? Exploring the work of one of the molecular biologists, the thesis argues that the world cannot be entirely encompassed by the matter or pure physicality of modernist metaphysics. This raises the possibility of other modes of existence - modes that people have long considered imperative to human well-being: e.g. in the work of kruiedokters, who specialise in curing people of illnesses and ailments associated with toor (witchcraft/magic). In order not to unfairly reduce these phenomena to belief or superstition, three of the five chapters attempt to attune to the ways in which three vital concepts - krag (power/vitality/strength), toor, and wind (wind), which are central to the work of kruiedokters - exist in people's lives. Attuning meant following, in research and description, the living ecologies of relations through which krag, toor, and wind subsist. While belief can be understood to be part of the relational field, it is as much the constricting force of jealous, poisonous relations themselves that block people's lives. To free patients of these blockages, kruiedokters bring the force of their personality, the cleansing effects of plants, as well as their own ecologies of relations to bear on the therapeutic contexts in which they work. If this succeeds, patients are drawn into a new set of protecting relations that cultivate feelings of krag - enabling patients to move forward with their lives. This poses the challenge that these relations, this work of kruiedokters, this krag, can be understood as being of central importance to human life - and not just as colourful cultural additions to an objectively known world of pure physicality. Studying the interplay of different modes of existence in therapeutic contexts is suggested as a possible way to carry out future, non-reductive collaborations between biomedicine, plant science, and 'traditional' medicine.

Keywords

Social Anthropology

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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