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Negotiating Health and Identity: Lay Healing, Medicinal Plants, and Indigenous Healthscapes in Highland Peru

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Catherine Leah Gold  and
Roger Alex Clapp
Catherine Leah Gold
Affiliation:
Ryerson University
Roger Alex Clapp
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Abstract

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Global health-care models for developing countries urge integration of traditional medicine with Western biomedicine. This article shows how residents of a remote Peruvian village negotiate among biomedicine, traditional medicine, lay indigenous medicine, and local knowledge of medicinal plants. Villagers' health-care choices reveal that they often resort to medicinal plants before modern pharmaceuticals. Their discourses show that these choices reflect social and cultural processes beyond the medical: the revitalization of Andean identity, the conflictual relationship that villagers have with modernity, and the desire to evade or subvert the power that Western medicine has over them. This article elaborates the concept of the healthscape as an individual's subjective vision of a landscape's medical resources and institutions, limited by cost and accessibility and shaped by the uneasy coexistence of Western and indigenous medical systems.

Resumen

Resumen

Los modelos de atención de salud mundial para los países en vías de desarrollo instan que la medicina tradicional se integre con la biomedicina occidental. En este trabajo se muestra como los habitantes de una remota aldea peruana negocian entre la biomedicina, la medicina tradicional, la medicina indígena laica, y el conocimiento local de las plantas medicinales. Las elecciones en atención de salud por los aldeanos revelan que a menudo recurren a las plantas medicinales antes de fármacos modernos. Sus discursos muestran que estas elecciones reflejan los procesos sociales y culturales más que la medicina: la revitalización de la identidad andina, la relación conflictiva que los aldeanos tienen con la modernidad y el deseo de evadir o subvertir el poder que la medicina occidental tiene sobre ellos. En este trabajo se elabora el concepto de la healthscape como la visión subjetiva de un individuo de recursos y instituciones médicas en un paisaje, limitado por el costo y la accesibilidad, y formado por la coexistencia inquieta de los sistemas de medicina occidental e indígena.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , 2011 , pp. 93 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

The authors thank Justo Mantilla Holguín of IEPLAM as well as the people of Añawi. We also thank Nadine Schuurman and Valorie Crooks for their helpful comments. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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