ON THE CREATION AND DISSOLUTION OF ETHNOMEDICAL SYSTEMS IN THE MEDICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF AFRICA

Between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s a number of publications appeared in which earlier ethnographies of illness and misfortune in Africa wer e criticised for placing too much emphasis on supernatural causation a nd neglecting natural causation and Practical medical behaviour. Indee d, following Warren's (1974) first criticism of Field, there was what almost amounted to a crusade to prove that Africans traditionally reco gnised a separate medical domain in which they interpret illness prima rily in empirical and practical rather than in social and moral terms. This article criticises the attempt to cast African aetiologies in a new light. Proceeding from a discussion of the distinction between nat uralistic and personalistic aetiologies, around which the whole issue revolves, it examines the critics' claim that ethnographers have place d too much emphasis on supernatural causation in African aetiologies, that once these aetiologies are viewed more broadly they can in fact b e seen to be largely naturalistic, and that one of the reasons for thi s bias is that earlier ethnographies, in particular Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic, have been wrongly interpreted. A discus sion of Evans-Pritchard's own description of Zande aetiology leads to the conclusion that the recent reinterpretations of Zande aetiology ar e mistaken. This raises the question: why the sudden desire to delinea te discrete medical systems, and why so much emphasis on natural causa tion and practical activity? Following a discussion of Wimbum aetiolog y and the concept of medicine, based on fieldwork in the Grassfields o f Cameroon, the author argues that the emphasis on naturalistic causat ion and practical activity in the definition of African medical system s does not make them broader, as the protagonists claim, but narrower, and that the 'broader' descriptions of medical systems are not more a ccurate representations of how Africans interpret and cope with illnes s but biomedically determined constructs imposed on African culture th rough medical ethnography. The article concludes with a plea for the d issolution of the concept of 'ethnomedical systems'.