Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on idiom
- 1 The coming of the Earth People
- 2 A certain degree of instability
- 3 Madness, vice and tabanka: popular knowledge of psychopathology in Trinidad
- 4 Mother Earth and the psychiatrists
- 5 Putting Out The Life
- 6 Your ancestor is you: Africa in a new world
- 7 Nature and the millennium
- 8 Incest: the naked earth
- 9 The Beginning Of The End: everyday life in the valley
- 10 Genesis of meaning, limits of mimesis
- APPENDICES
- Glossary
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
3 - Madness, vice and tabanka: popular knowledge of psychopathology in Trinidad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on idiom
- 1 The coming of the Earth People
- 2 A certain degree of instability
- 3 Madness, vice and tabanka: popular knowledge of psychopathology in Trinidad
- 4 Mother Earth and the psychiatrists
- 5 Putting Out The Life
- 6 Your ancestor is you: Africa in a new world
- 7 Nature and the millennium
- 8 Incest: the naked earth
- 9 The Beginning Of The End: everyday life in the valley
- 10 Genesis of meaning, limits of mimesis
- APPENDICES
- Glossary
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Summary
Before describing Mother Earth's experiences against the criteria of biomedicine one needs to consider those existing local representations of illness which recall the psychiatrist's field of interest, for it is these ideas which reflect back upon and shape, stigmatise or amplify any personal psychopathology.
Five relatively discrete patterns are identified which we can map for the moment by not dissimilar biomedical categories: doltishness (broadly recalling mental handicap and senility), malkadi (epilepsy), vices (addictions and abnormal personality), madness (psychosis) and tabanka (a context-specific ‘depressive’ reaction). Although each may be regarded locally as akin to physical sickness, emphasis is placed on their ultrahuman and personalistic aetiology and on their social context, both rather different from the illnesses treated with everyday bush medicine. They cannot, however, be considered in isolation from physical sickness for there are recognised mechanisms in common, idioms which evoke significant local values, productive relations and shared history. The images of nature, power and selfhood which madness reveals make it as good a starting point as any for examining the institutions which are transformed by Mother Earth.
Bush medicine
Popular medicine in Trinidad employs bush – the leaves, flowers, shoots, barks and roots of a variety of plants – which can be used in conjunction with commercial oils and essences. Medicinal plants are grown in the house yards or are easily found in the forest or cocoa estates which surround the villages. Every adult in the village of Pinnacle has a working knowledge of some bush and most can describe the properties of between thirty and a hundred.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pathology and IdentityThe Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad, pp. 33 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993