title: Magical Empiricism and 'Exposed Being' in Medicine and Traditional Healing.
abstract: Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete ('accidental') instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific. Both logics are based on empirical observations, but are inversions of each other; these I characterize as 'magical empiricism.' 'Magic' functions as a metapragmatic discourse to recruit a clientele from a skeptical public that doubts the efficacy of any therapeutic interventions, and it acts in parallel with other practical (and efficacious) healing acts. I introduce the concept of 'exposed beings' to describe locally specific constructions of the person as patient and healer. This helps to explain the existence and enduring appeal of many different medical practices and beliefs in South Africa, but I suggest that 'medical parallelism' rather than 'pluralism' might be more accurate.
authors: a Department of Anthropology , University of the Witwatersrand , Braamfontein , South Africa.
authors: Robert
authors: R
authors: Thornton
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D001294:Attitude to Health; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D019348:Empiricism; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D016488:Medicine, African Traditional; D008875:Middle Aged; D013019:South Africa / Q000208:ethnology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: South Africa; empiricism; magic; medical pluralism; traditional healers