Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MEDICINE (MEDICINE. Indigenous concepts of health and healing in Andean populations: understanding the relevance of traditional MEDICINE in a changing world.)

Teaser

What can the archaeological and ethnohistorical records tell us about the way people adapt their health beliefs and attitudes to illness in the face of war, dislocation and persecution?‘MEDICINE’ is a new project funded under the EC Horizon 2020 Marie-Sklodowska Curie...

Summary

What can the archaeological and ethnohistorical records tell us about the way people adapt their health beliefs and attitudes to illness in the face of war, dislocation and persecution?
‘MEDICINE’ is a new project funded under the EC Horizon 2020 Marie-Sklodowska Curie Actions, to determine concepts of health and healing from a culturally specific indigenous context, using a framework of interdisciplinary methods which integrates archaeological-historical, ethnographic and modern health sciences approaches. The study will generate new theoretical and methodological approaches to model how peoples survive and adapt their traditional belief systems in a context of alien cultural impacts.

New conceptual models of Andean understandings of health, illness and healing, and the ways these have adapted and changed through time, will be used to develop ‘bridging’ models transferable to contemporary global policy scenarios relevant to marginalised and migrant peoples and provide a means through which their traditional health beliefs and current needs may be more appropriately understood and met. The study offers a novel perspective and methods in the development policies sensitive to indigenous and minority people’s health needs.

Work performed

The project has completed all three stages over the two outgoing years and final return phase year which have involved: 1) establishing baselines of concepts deductible for pre-European/early colonial periods; 2) conducting surveys of contemporary indigenous communities to understand the continuity of ancestral beliefs and practices particularly related to health, 3) using data drawn from the first two stages, particularly the stage 2 survey, together with a wide range of additional sources including relevant literature and information drawn from interviews with health professionals in Ecuador, to move towards the overall foal of formulating ‘transferable policy and practitioners’ tools for use in contemporary population displacement scenarios.

It has also established current levels and kinds of health needs and provision in the country today and compared/contrasted this with the continued belief in/use of traditional medicine. The project initially used a multi (inter) disciplinary methodology from archaeology, ethnohistory, ethnography and health sciences, employing primarily emic approaches to studying indigenous Andean peoples’ own understanding of their world and how health, well-being, illness/disease, therapy and healing are understood within this (the ‘conceptual’ phase). Research undertaken from archaeological material culture (archival, bibliographic and museum collections), ethnohistorical (relevant historical archives in Spain, Quito and Lima) and ethnographic studies (bibliographic) have combined as a tri-focal approach to generating and verifying core concepts related to Andean people’s belief systems. Discussions with medical practitioners working with contemporary indigenous Andean peoples served to expand and deepen these core concepts, beliefs and practices, which then allowed the construction of a questionnaire to take into three indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Andes.

During the first two years of MEDICINE, the ER Elizabeth Currie was based at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador working with academics and professionals experienced in Traditional Medicine in Andean contexts and with indigenous communities. Through these contacts, the ER has been able to bring her own experience and understanding of indigenous cosmology into a productive forum with people and situations that have allowed the evolution of a more mature comprehensive understanding of these. During the final third year the ER returned to the Department of Archaeology (also the Department of Health Sciences) to write up the second survey stage and begin the third and final stage of meeting the overall project goals of health care modelling and transferable policy and practitioners ‘tools’.

A total of seven international conferences were attended in all, two during the third and final year, and papers presented at each in through the course of the study, offering different views and perspectives on the project. Further publications will be prepared using the chapters of the project final report (freely available on the project website), several of which are already suitable for submission. The project final report “Indigenous Concepts of health and healing in Andean Populations. The Relevance of Traditional medicine in a Changing World” will be published fully in due course as a monograph. The project website www.andeanmedicine.net was kept fully up to date throughout the course of the work to reflect the different stages as completed, and, where possible (and of wider interest) blogs were published about different aspects of the work and disseminated widely to a global audience.

Final results

The innovative aspects of MEDICINE involved the evolution of new and more culturally appropriate ways of addressing population displacement and trauma through specifically addressing alternative ways that people experience their world, their understandings of ‘reality’ and the traditional structures embedded in their cultures, behaviours, belief systems and lifeways that form the fundamentals of their sense of Identity. The project was successful in attracting funding because it adopted these innovative approaches, rather than simply refining existing approaches which are fundamentally those of the imposition of an alien (Euro-centric) model of the world onto peoples who often have very different ways of experiencing life. In the highly mobile and destructive milieus of the modern world and the current global crises, the development of these approaches should allow for a people’s individual and collective identity via their traditional cultures to be better protected in a way that enhances displaced peoples’ social, physical and mental well -being. The final report of this work available at https://www.andeanmedicine.net/about amply demonstrates the very innovative lines of research and thinking which resulted in the production of the recommendations for policy and practice made.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.andeanmedicine.net/.