Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The Way I See It # 534

My Anthropology professor is an awesome guy. He's an "absent minded professor" but his experiences doing ethnography are inspiring, motivating, and at times, frightening. His studies focused on Shamanism in South America with the Mazatec peoples. Prof. Abse doesn't like talking about his experiences, but since we're studying shamanism in his class, he has been willing to open up.

However, last class he became jumbled, which isn't uncommon, and couldn't continue the lecture properly. He told us that he is skeptical of Shamanic healing, and a student asked him if a bad experience was the cause of this. He said yes, in the village he was studying at a bout of cholera had broken out and several people died. This young man was brought to the hut he was staying in with the Shaman, and it was clear that he was going to die if they didn't get him to a hospital. However, the young man's frightened sister took him to another Shaman, who advised he shouldn't accept western medicine. The young man was dead by morning.

It was clear that Prof. Abse was hung up on probably many more disturbing things he had experienced during his ethnography, and couldn't continue the lecture because of it.

The ethical implication connected with ethnographic field study I'm sure are hard to bear, and knowing exactly what someone needs to do in order to survive and illness and not be able to help him because of cultural differences is something I never considered.

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