Imagining Authenticity in the Local Medicines of Chiapas, Mexico

Abstract

Ⅲ This paper describes and discusses the existing gap between local medicines as practiced by healers in the Highlands of Chiapas and the way in which NGO personnel and other foreigners imagine them. It is argued that nonindigenous people in the region possess a tourist gaze that creates a distance (spatial and temporal) between cosmopolitan and local practices that lead them to view local medicines as exotic knowledge. The Museum of Maya Medicine described in this article demonstrates how, through this same tourist gaze, local medicines are confined into a secure space and tied to another time. I discuss how, while cosmopolitan medicine's practitioners and 'tourists' recreate local medicines in the museum as something culturally authentic, local medicines are, in contrast, characterized by their hybridity.

Remodeling the Arsenal of Chinese Medicine: Shared Pasts, Alternative Futures

“…In doing so, we (Ricklis 1992) and continues to do so as theories, technologies, and those who make and implement them travel increasingly faster in a postmodern world (Perry 1995;Said 1982). Hybridity and syncretism, mediated and structured by competition and power differentials rather than the coexistence of clearly demarcated medical systems, appear to be the norm where different medical practices coexist in the same sociocultural space (Ayora-Diaz 2000;Brodwin 1996 (1996,157), following Feher (1990), argued that as a genealogist, Foucault was always concerned with the structure of regimes of knowledge/power rather than the complex processes that generated, stabilized, or changed them.…”

Complementary Medicine: Cosmopolitan and Popular Knowledge, and Transcultural Translations - Cases from Urban Mexico

“…This is even more important where there is a long 'tradition' of herbal and 'local' medicine that interfaces with an under-regulated and rapidly changing health market. This can result in an idealization and a nostalgia for an indigenous healing knowledge that, precisely for this reason, is increasingly commodified in particular and selective forms for a non-indigenous public (Ayora-Diaz, 2000).…”

“…'Cosmopolitan' medicine is both a demand for a certain medical product, as well as the consumption of a plural medical style that differentiates people. This rhetoric is often filtered through a nostalgia for authenticity, which fixes 'traditional', healing and medical knowledge into a non-hybridized form that can be better consumed (Ayora-Diaz, 2000).…”

“…4. There are obviously some exceptions; see, for instance, Madel (1999) for a general and insightful discussion on CAM in Brazil and Latin America, or Ayora-Diaz (2000), Nigenda et al (2001) and Whiteford (1999) on Mexico. 5.…”