Magical Empiricism and ‘Exposed Being’ in Medicine and Traditional Healing

Abstract

Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete (‘accidental’) instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific. Both logics are based on empirical observations, but are inversions of each other; these I characterize as ‘magical empiricism.’ ‘Magic’ functions as a metapragmatic discourse to recruit a clientele from a skeptical public that doubts the efficacy of any therapeutic interventions, and it acts in parallel with other practical (and efficacious) healing acts. I introduce the concept of ‘exposed beings’ to describe locally specific constructions of the person as patient and healer. This helps to explain the existence and enduring appeal of many different medical practices and beliefs in South Africa, but I suggest that ‘medical parallelism’ rather than ‘pluralism’ might be more accurate.

Keywords:

• empiricism
• magic
• medical pluralism
• South Africa
• traditional healers

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork was funded under a number of research grants from the South African National Research Foundation, including Grant Number 85982.

Notes on contributors

Robert Thornton

Robert Thornton (PhD Chicago 1978) is honorary research professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.