Introduction

It is now widely accepted in medical anthropology and in the social sciences in general, that illness is an embodied cultural experience. Thus, rather than being an objective entity hovering over our human consciousness, illness is a cultural category. Feminist scholars, sociologists, medical anthropologists and many other social scientists have powerfully illustrated how the influence of moral values and subjective meanings is regularly imposed on information that is often presented simply as biological facts. Furthermore, Good argues that disease, the presumably objective description of illness, belongs to the culture of biomedicine, and that ‘culture is not only a means of representing disease, but is essential to its very constitution as a human reality’. Illness belongs to the cultural territory where it is experienced and confronted by suffering bodies and treated by healers. Like any other cultural category, illness is culturally contingent; and therefore it is also a polysemic experience. Hence, due to its cultural contingency, depending on age, ethnicity, education, religion, social position, geographical origin, gender and place, people perceive, experience and configure illness in a multiplicity of fashions.

In this paper I examine the culturally contingent nature of illness in the context of place among the people of Veracruz del Zapotal, or Veracruceños, from the department of Rivas, in southwest Nicaragua. Veracruceños are a Spanish-speaking Indigenous community claiming to be descendents of the Nahua people who settled in the Isthmus of Rivas around ad 500, and came to be known as the Nicarao.