A01=Isabelle Stengers
A01=Tobie Nathan
alternative therapy
Author_Isabelle Stengers
Author_Tobie Nathan
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JH
Category=MBD
Category=NL-JH
Category=NL-MB
COP=United Kingdom
Discount=15
divination
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
HMM=214
IMPN=Polity Press
ISBN13=9781509521852
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20180706
POP=Oxford
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
PUB=Polity Press
SMM=23
Subject=Medicine: General Issues
Subject=Sociology & Anthropology
traditional medicine
WG=370
WMM=141
Product details
- ISBN 9781509521852
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 142 x 218 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jul 2018
- Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
- Publication City/Country: Oxford, GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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We think we know what healers do: they build on patients’ irrational beliefs and treat them in a ‘symbolic’ way. If they get results, it’s thanks to their capacity to listen, rather than any influence on a clinical level. At the same time, we also think we know what modern medicine is: a highly technical and rational process, but one that scarcely listens to patients at all.
In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interesting precisely because they don’t listen to patients, using techniques of ‘divination’ rather than ‘diagnosis’. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer. Modern medicine, for its part, is characterized by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment.
Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom.
In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interesting precisely because they don’t listen to patients, using techniques of ‘divination’ rather than ‘diagnosis’. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer. Modern medicine, for its part, is characterized by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment.
Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom.
Tobie Nathan is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Université Paris-VIII.
Isabelle Stengers is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Isabelle Stengers is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
