Qi,

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May I interrupt the discussion on jobs in anthropology for a moment
and ask John Mcreery and the rest of the members of ANTHRO-L if
anyone has collected any data in the course of doing funded fieldwork
or anthropological observation because that is what we've all been
trained to do - on:

world views about healing, the treatment of disease and the cause of
disease and accidents

For example, those of you who have been in China, Taiwan and any of the
large ethnic Chinese communities - have any of you witnessed and taken
notes on the concept of QI in acupuncture, massage or what looks like
faith healing (Bill Moyer's program on Healing and the Mind comments
in the Skeptical Inquirer and James Randi's exposee on faith healing
in the Soviet Union)?

Have any of you who have visited or worked in India taken notes on
the Ayurvedic system and have you thought about how it compares with
the Chinese system?

Have any of you studied, done field work on or worked around shamanistic
healers or folk healers specifically recording their beliefs about
the healing process and their concept of a medical model?

I'm doing a dissertation on "The Growth of the Medical Research Literature
on Nonwestern Medicine from 1966-1993: An Example of a Scientific
Paradigm Change" and in the process of coding over 18,000 references
and abstracts I'm trying to develop a profile of the various medical
models trying to identify aspects which fall within the realm of
religion and cosmological beliefs about the self, etc., and aspects that
are empirical - i.e. we use this plant because it does xyz, or you
have to bind the wound, straighten the broken bone, etc.

Because so many of the people on this discussion list have had a plethora
of experiences in and outside of academia, I'm hoping that the training
received in the course of one's studies has made this group acutely
aware of the cultural aspects of healing and produce an interesting
collection of first hand accounts.

Thank you in advance and so I can add my 2 cents, I'm doing my Ph.D.
in an interdisciplinary department at Rutgers falling between
information science and communication science with most of my cited
works coming from the sociology of science and primary nonwestern
sources. Much of the data I'm coding, however, is pure anthropology
and ethnobotany.

Has anyone read this month's issue of Scientific American? Ethnobotanists
are scarce and pharmaceutical companies are just beginning to realize
the mistake of abandoning funding in that area. Comments anyone?

Barbara Ruth Campbell
School of Communication, Information and Library Studies
Rutgers University
campbell@zodiac.rutgers.edu

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