Sometimes the attraction of a field of study emerges naturally and predictably within the ivied structure of an academic setting; sometimes it ambushes you from an unanticipated stronghold. In the course of many years of academic training in folklore, I never regarded medical folklore as a specialty. Although my office as a graduate student at UCLA adjoined that of Wayland Hand, the distinguished American taxonomist of medical folklore, his room-length boxes of file cards and the boundless store of arcane tidbits painstakingly organized struck me at the time as more exotic than relevant to contemporary ethnography. It was not until...

Both the term “folk medicine” and the conceptual category to which it refers are academic constructs that identify a particular subset of healing and health care practice. The most common interpretation of folk medicine in both popular and professional thought is that it represents a body of belief and practice isolated in various ways from the social and cultural “mainstream” and intriguingly unaffected by “modern” knowledge, with which it is frequently compared on the apparent presumption that “folk” and “modern” are mutually exclusive classifications. Folk medicine thus tends to be conceptualized within a hierarchical model of knowledge and sophistication of...

Their existence scarcely noted by medical and cultural researchers,botánicashave burgeoned in recent years not only in Los Angeles but throughout the country (principal works on the subject include Borrello and Mathias 1977; Fisch 1968; George 1980; Murphy 1988; and Suro 1991). For many Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles, they are a point of entry into the community, the source of familiar sacramental items, a mainstay of spiritual, family, and personal counseling, and the provider of crucial herbal preparations for various illnesses. Associated with such ethnomedical and spiritual systems as Santería, folk Catholicism, Curanderismo, Espiritismo, and Hoodoo...

As the old saying goes, Tillman (Tim) Waggoner of Knoxville, Tennessee, is a “man of many parts.” Born in 1940 and raised in the Marble City community in the formerly rural Third Creek section of west Knoxville, at various points in his life Tim Waggoner has been a moonshiner (very briefly), soldier, Missionary Baptist preacher and radio evangelist, folk healer, blue-collar laborer, folk festival performer, university guest lecturer, and also author and publisher of several collections of local folktales, recipes, and home remedies, includingThe Poor Man’s Medicine Bag(1984). Tim Waggoner wroteThe Poor Man’s Medicine Bag“to help...

As students of folk medicine are well aware, the uneasy coexistence of diverse health belief systems in the United States is nothing new. Popular interest in these various healing systems seems to have increased with the development of patient empowerment and medical consumerism, as well as recent changes in the organization of health care delivery, particularly managed care (Adler, McGraw, and McKinlay 1998). Despite this widespread public interest, researchers noted in 1992 that “most physicians are unaware of [alternative medicine’s] popularity, much less that many of their own patients are also being cared for by practitioners of alternative medicine” (Murray...

“Risk” is a word we hear a lot these days, whether it be in academic discussions of “risk assessment,” “risk analysis,” or “risk perception” or in discrete areas of life such as “environmental risks,” “financial risks,” or “public health risks.” AIDS literature uses the word “risk” perhaps more than any other term and, in fact, a significant moment in the epidemiological understanding of AIDS is marked by the change in reference from “risk groups” to “risk activities.” The notion of “risk groups” (such as Haitians, homosexuals, and intravenous drug users) rather than “risk activities” (such as sharing needles or sex...

The 10 August 1997 issue of theWestchester Weekly, a section of the SundayNew York Times, includes an article entitled “Prayer Group in Patterson Follows Rituals of Indian Purifying” (Fullam 1997). The piece recounts the use of the Lakota Indian sweat lodge ritual accompanied by a “drum ceremony” adapted from the Micmacs by a group of suburbanites who call themselves the “Red Road.” Though some of the participants state that they have been adopted by Native American families, “the closest thing to an actual American Indian in the group” is a person of Italian and Shoshone descent (the latter...

A blurb on the cover of the June 1998Lapidary Journal, “The Comeback Mystic: Hildegard von Bingen,” announces an accompanying article by Si and Ann Frazier entitled “Woman of the Millennium.” The website for Wellspring, a company offering products that promote wellness of mind, body, and spirit, touts this same visionary as “A 12th Century Mystic, A 90’s Woman” (wellmedia.com/news/week54/mystic.html), and an electronic advertisement for Heinrich Schipperges’sHealing and the Nature of the Cosmosexplains Hildegard “is once again a cult figure with CDs and T-shirts celebrating her popularity” (raw.rutgers.edu/raw/publisher/hist/vonbingen.htm). The plethora of attention devoted to Hildegard of Bingen (1098–...

Once again, the ninth week of a ten-week quarter in introductory anthropology had arrived. For eight weeks I had stressed how comparison and objectivity in anthropological research has helped us make sense of subjects as varied as human evolution and human activity patterns, the logic of kinship, and economic systems. Now it was time to turn from a discussion of anthropology as science to a discussion of anthropology as an interpretive discipline. It was time to focus class attentions on the variety of meanings with which social groups inscribe human experience and on the role of “culture” in shaping these....

Before entering into this discussion, I need to make clear that these comments and observations are not made by a Navajo but by a non-Navajo who has spent more than forty years as an adopted member of a Navajo family, the Yellowmans. This does not confer on me any special right to speak for or represent the Navajos in general or the Yellowman family in particular; it does not entitle me to dispense Navajo ritual “secrets,” or to claim that I am providing the reader with an inside view of Navajo spiritual healing. Indeed, I regard all books by non-Natives...