![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces the European Commission-funded project ‘MEDICINE: Indigenous Concepts of Health and Healing in Andean Populations’, which takes a time-depth perspective to its subject, and uses a framework of interdisciplinary methods which integrates archaeological-historical, ethnographic and modern health sciences approaches. The long-term study objective is ultimately to offer novel perspectives and methods in the global agenda to develop policies sensitive to indigenous, refugee and migrant people’s social, economic and health needs, as well as culturally sensitive approaches to the conservation of their ‘intangible cultural heritage’. This paper focuses on the project’s first phase, the critical examination of archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence and accounts from contemporary indigenous practitioners of Andean Traditional Medicine. These sources then shape the development of health beliefs and practices models which have informed the development of questionnaires for the second ‘survey’ phase of three indigenous Andean populations in the Central Sierra region of Ecuador.
Acknowledgments
This project ‘MEDICINE. Indigenous concepts of health and healing in Andean populations. The relevance of traditional MEDICINE in a changing world’ is funded through the European Commission Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme. Grateful thanks are expressed to the Comunidade de Huasalata, Salasaka, Tungurahua, Ecuador, including Jorge Caisabanda and his family for their hospitality and help during fieldwork visits. Particular thanks are also expressed to Don Rubelio Masaquiza Jiménez of Huasalata for his permission to include personal information and photographs to the benefit of this paper.
Notes
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Elizabeth Currie
Elizabeth Currie is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Experienced Researcher and Global Fellow at the Department of Archaeology, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Health Sciences, University of York, United Kingdom. Elizabeth has regularly worked across disciplinary and methodological boundaries throughout her rich and varied career which has consisted of two principal trajectories: that of South American archaeology and anthropology, and health sciences and health workforce research. In recent years she developed her lifelong interests in ethnographic and ethnohistorical study of Latin America, during which period she lived and worked with indigenous Andean communities in Ecuador, researching Andean traditional culture and medicine.
John Schofield
John Schofield is Head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of York where he is also Director of Studies in Cultural Heritage Management. John is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists and a Docent in Cultural Heritage, Landscape and Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Turku (Finland). He is also Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University, Adelaide. He has published extensively in the fields of cultural heritage, archaeology of the recent and contemporary pasts, and the archaeology of conflict.
Fernando Ortega Perez
Fernando Ortega Perez has directed the National Institute of Nutritional and Social Medicine Research (Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nutricionales y Medico Sociales) throughout the 1980s and was manager of USAID health programmes for Ecuador. He was also Dean of the School of Public Health. He has carried out many research programmes and evaluations in Anthropology, Demography, Epidemiology, Public Health, Nutrition, Parasitology, Traditional Medicine and Intercultural Health. Fernando has a keen professional interest in Ancestral and Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Remedies, Health and Environment; Tropical Diseases and Human Parasitology; Environmental Conservation and Climate Change, Global Traditional Medicine and Research Ethics.
Diego Quiroga
Diego Quiroga is Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Anthropology as well as Vice President of Research at San Francisco de Quito University. He has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA. He both lectures and leads research primarily on medical anthropology, human ecology and race and ethnicity. He is the USFQ representative for the ‘Alliance’, an association of several national and international organizations responsible for the USAID Project Conservation of the Galapagos Marine Reserve. Diego is Co-director of the Galapagos Academic Institute of Arts and Sciences (GAIAS) and has done research on topics that range from Biodiversity Vulnerability, to Religion and Traditional Medicine.