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Anthropologie et Sociétés

Les mirages de la rationalité des savoirs ethnomédicauxRaymond Massé

ConfluencesVolume 21, Number 1, 1997

URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/015461arDOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/015461ar

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Publisher(s)Département d'anthropologie de l'Université Laval

ISSN0702-8997 (print)1703-7921 (digital)

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Cite this articleMassé, R. (1997). Les mirages de la rationalité des savoirs ethnomédicaux.Anthropologie et Sociétés, 21(1), 53–72. https://doi.org/10.7202/015461ar

Article abstractThe Mirages of Rationality in Ethnomedicinal KnowledgesRationality is a key value in the management of health Systems. It is at the veryheart of thé rationalization project of western care Systems and is referred toas the ultimate criterion in evaluation of world ethnomedicines. Anthropologyhas since the very beginning argued on the logical, illogical or alogicalfoundations of ethnomedical knowledges and practices and has contested theimmanence of the rationality in the western medical system. We argue herethat the main contribution of anthropology to the analysis of the place ofrationality in ethnomedicinal knowledges and practices remains in the criticalanalysis of three reified mirages of rationality. These are the mirage ofirrational beliefs as empiricist propositional statements, as products instead ofas acts of language, the mirage of the systematicity and coherence of theinterrelations linking those beliefs and the mirage of consistency betweenpractices and goals or of the universality of instrumental reason. In order to gobeyond a simple critique of the abuses of rationality, we propose thatanthropology must go above and beyond the debate on the formai criteriadefining rationality of practices and the logics of knowledges. It must redefineethnomedical knowledges not as a product empirically expressed through aconstellation of beliefs, even if systematically organized, but as a process ofinterpretation and explanation of illness and sickness. Knowledge is not asummation of propositional beliefs but a virtual reality, the matrix from whichpeople build illness interpretations throughout complex therapeutic itinerariesthat cross a plurality of care Systems and ethnomedicines. Rationality must notbe sought out in the formai characteristics of knowledges and practices but inthé process of meaning production.Key words : Masse, rationality, ethnomedicine, health, epistemology,knowledge