The aim of
Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Traditional Medicine is to acknowledge the vast range of medical practices that fall outside western clinical practice by offering a source book on different systems of healing, their treatment logic, structures of classification regarding illness and disease (relating to the body, cosmology), forms of illness and disease recognition, aetiology, symptomatology, and so forth. This volume places a range of practices in a comparative framework without subjecting any of these practices to frames of understanding that might distort their specific significance and effect.
Traditional medicine is concerned with the health of human beings and includes highly codified practices like those directly concerned with physical and mental ailments and injury, such as ayurveda, the various disciplines of Chinese medicine, Arabian medicine, as well as a host of ritual and shamanic-type systems around the world. A central objective of Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Traditional Medicine is to bring together ethnographic and historical materials never before collected in such a way. The field of traditional medical knowledge and practice constitutes an enormous body of valuable knowledge developed in a great variety of different historical and cultural contexts and, in this volume, anthropologist and editor Bruce Kapferer hopes to emphasize the significance of tranditional medical practices by presenting vital information in an accessible manner. This reference will be of great value to scholars, practitioners, specialists in medical and nonmedical fields, and concerned general readers.
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PLEASE NOTE: I think we need to modify the title (and blurb) to signal that this book problematizes the old-fashioned binary of biomedicine & traditional medicine.
