Lugbara illness beliefs and social change

Abstract

Opening Paragraph A considerable part of the anthropological literature on Africa is devoted to the description of African ideas about the causes of misfortune and illness and the steps which should be taken to remedy them. In the early days of African ethnography information on this aspect of culture was usually presented as part of a general ethnography or included in a more specific description of an African cosmological system. As the general ethnographic literature on Africa accumulated, and as the need for more focused information for application in health and development work arose, studies which investigated the more narrow domain of African therapeutics became more common. As Janzen has observed (1978: 121), the study of African therapeutic systems has now moved into a phase of exemplary field studies which gather data in a number of different areas: illness taxonomies, curative techniques, healing roles, health-care decision-making resource allocations, course of illnesses through distinct episodes, and the relationship between bioecological and sociocultural factors. No one would deny that an ideal study would gather data in all these areas. The study of Lugbara medicine reported on in this paper, however, was carried out under difficult conditions and was abruptly halted after one year because of the worsening political situation. No epidemiological or biomedical data were collected.