Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн

41 страница из 242

The effort to hash out such distinctions reflected the prioritization of a meaning-centered focus and growing use of the emic-etic framework, absorbed through linguistics. “Etic” constructs (such as the temperature represented on a thermometer) are meant to be universally applicable or culture-free. The problematic assumption of one true empirical reality notwithstanding, etic constructs are opposed to “emic” ideas: ideas (and note the implication there) that cultural insiders have about themselves and their worlds. “Disease” was an etic, universally measurable entity. “Illness” (the emic perception) was not. As such, illness could refer to a variety of conditions cross-culturally, some of which might not exist in other cultural worlds.

Thinkers of the day soon realized that, however helpful, this disease-illness dichotomy recapitulates the mind-body dichotomy that, even then, some criticized biomedicine for trafficking in. This view took fuel in part from the bourgeoning rift between positivist-minded and interpretive or hermeneutic scholars – a rift often termed the “two cultures” or science-humanities split, a la Charles Percy Snow (1993 [1959]). The problem was that while disease, as the dichotomy defined it, was bodily, illness was conversely mental: Disease was thus attributed a real, concrete, scientific factuality or objectivity that illness, as a subjective category, could be denied (see Hahn 1984).