Abstract
An important consideration in the examination of situations of medical pluralism in Melanesia is the overall indigenous response to outside initiatives. Given the diffuse and intertwined nature of beliefs and practices concerning health, morality and religion in these societies, it is frequently the case that initiatives and responses that appear unrelated in type and time to the administrators of health programmes may have important bearings upon each other. Many studies throughout the world reveal that cultural factors influence the ways in which people perceive and deal with innovative ideas and practices introduced from the outside. The nature of the innovations themselves and their mode of introduction are no less important. Anthropologists and other scholars often overlook this latter complexity, writing of “Christianity”, “capitalism”, and “Western medicine” in vague terms without specifying the usually very attenuated versions of these systems of ideas and practices that are actually offered to or forced upon rural peoples in the Third World.
We know there are government and mission hospitals. You young people read and write so you know what is happening. I was told by the white priest that the mission and government hospitals give a different medicine. Our Papuan doctors do the same as those in the hospital. When people get sick they must decide whether to go to the village healer or one of the hospitals. You must go to one of these. You will either be better or you will die. You must show some trust that they will make your son, daughter or wife well.
Adelbert Sevaru, an elder in Uiaku village
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Notes
This section is based upon archival materials in the Anglican Archives located in the New Guinea Collection in the Library of the University of Papua New Guinea and patrol reports deposited in the National Archives of Papua New Guinea. The materials for a more extensive historical study of health care in the Collingwood Bay area were tragically destroyed in a fire at the Wanigela health centre in 1982.
I unfortunately did not have access to recent health statistics for the Collingwood Bay area. I was told by health workers in the area that malaria and tuberculosis accounted today for most deaths. The Oro Provincial Handbook (1980) states that the province has the second highest rate of malaria parasite infestation in the country.
A patrol report of 1968 listed 16 of the 78 Maisin individuals either employed or in professional training to be in medically related fields (Mendaris 1969). At least four Maisin men have undergone training to be dentists and two have graduated as medical doctors, including Dr Wilfred Moi, presently Head of the Mental Health Services and the first Papuan graduate in Medicine and Surgery from the Fiji School of Medicine (Moi 1976).
A similar distinction between sik noting and sik belong ples is reported for the North Solomons by Hamnett and Connell (1981).
For a discussion of the measures that are taken to protect unborn and newly born children from spirit and ghost attacks see Tietjen (1984).
As I noted earlier, healers blame this situation on historical circumstances: the revival in the use of traditional “poisons” without accompanying antidotes and the introduction of unfamiliar “poisons”. But Williams (1930: 239–94) also observed in the 1920s that Orokaiva curers declared their helplessness against anything but spirits: “it remains the general rule to impute this cause [material sorcery] for the more serious complaints. Further than this, it is imputed as cause especially for those complaints which cannot be cured. Thus when a doctor has tried his methods on a patient without success he is likely to set the case down as a hopeless one of sorcery and discontinue his treatment; and, indeed, if he be astute enough, he may decide to have no truck with any case that seems too far gone. For it is generally held that sorcery sickness cannot be cured by the ordinary methods of the healer.… Sorcery is, in fact, the native’s exegetical last card”. Orokaiva notions of the cauzation of disease, according to Williams’s account, varied in one significant way from those of the Maisin; the Orokaiva apparently believed that attacking spirits operated independently of any human agents.
Village Christianity was the focus of my research. The points made in this section are examined and documented in greater detail in Barker (1985).
Kikiki has a wide range of meanings, including “story”, “myth”, “traditional custom”, “clan emblem”, and “origin”. Sevaseva is a term heard throughout Tufi district in reference to healing seances, also known as kaara to the Maisin. Tamatari means “men”.
The historical developments described in this section are discussed and documented in much greater detail in Barker (1985).
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
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Barker, J. (1989). Western Medicine and the Continuity of Belief: The Maisin of Collingwood Bay, Oro Province. In: Frankel, S., Lewis, G. (eds) A Continuing Trial of Treatment. Culture, Illness, and Healing, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2731-5_3
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