Eduardo L. Menéndez Eduardo L. Menéndez D. in Anthropological Sciences (Universidad de Buenos Aires); Master in Public Health (Escuela Salud Pública de México); PhD in Anthropology (Universidad de Buenos Aires). Doctorates honoris causa by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili; by the Universidad Nacional de Rosario and by the Universidad Nacional de Lanús. Professor/Researcher Emeritus of the ciesas. He has developed numerous researches in the field of medical anthropology that has resulted in the publication of 32 books and notebooks; 119 articles and 108 book chapters. Among his books are the following: The denied part of culture. Relativism, differences and racism (2002); Of subjects, knowledge and structures. Introduction to the relational approach in the study of collective health. (2009); Power, social stratification and disease. Analysis of the social and economic conditions of the disease in Yucatan. (2021); Dying of alcohol. Knowledge and medical hegemony (2020).

Realidades socioculturales

Traditional medicine: Where are the life, suffering, violence and mortalities in native peoples?

  • Eduardo L. Menéndez

Keywords: biomedicine, exclusions, traditional medicine, methodology, transactions.

Abstract: This text describes and analyzes the processes of exclusion or secondaryization that exist in local studies of traditional medicine with respect to a whole series of health/disease/care/prevention processes that operate in the life of native peoples, despite the fact that most of these processes are included in the uses and customs of these peoples. The main exclusions reviewed refer to epidemiological processes, and especially to maternal mortality, as well as to close violence, childbirth and culturally forced child and youth relationships. It is shown that these studies exclude processes that are part of the native cultures and that generate a partial and distorted vision of their life, which does not allow understanding the current social, cultural and economic rationality of these peoples.