Skip to main content

Alternative ways of healing and knowing

This weeks readings dealt with alternative ways of healing and knowing, wonderful readings that taught me about rituals of healing in other cultures, but also about the struggles that people from these cultures have to deal with on a regular basis due to the forces of Western medicine.

Mansfield wrote about spiritual practice and beliefs related to healing. It sounded like a very promising article to begin with, but for some reason did the concept of measuring religiosity and believes in respect to healing NOT sit well with me. I don't understand why people are always trying to put everything within the frames of measurements - I do see that this will help them compare and in Mansfield's case, help to create a model (thinking about it, how stupid is that to begin with???) - but why is there this constant need to compare so one can look better than the other? You can tell from my strong reaction, I think Mansfield's article was maybe worth a big laugh, nothing more, nothing less!

The constant struggles of proofing oneself between traditional and western medicine as well as how political aspects play a role was wonderfully shown in the article by Cho on Korean medicine. The article lost me at some point in time, mainly due to its complexity which perfectly reflects how complicated and complex the whole topic is to begin with. How health and healing can be caught in a web of politics and money making.

Trotter made a great point in his article that it is impossible to make judgments about traditional medicine from the standpoint of biomedicine. For some reason that reminded me of some Americans that I know trying to tell me how much better the US are compared to Germany/Europe, yet they never have left the country. Or a little child saying I don't like spinach but they have never tried it before. It's ignorant of you ask me, and from someone with a doctorate degree practicing biomedicine I would expect a lot more. Yet, the article does not go into detail about why we need to assess and compare the two different approaches to begin with. Why can't we just learn and broaden our horizons about one another. This was shown in the book chapter by Adams on establishing proof. Her descriptions and struggles of trying to grasp how Dr. Dawa came to her diagnoses fascinated me. It was a perfect example of the interplay of politics, traditional, and western medicine.

Last but not least I want to talk briefly about the article by Abrums about her time spent with African-American women in a church in Seattle. Although her intentions were only to her best knowledge, it was shown that she still wasn't perceived this way by the members of the congregations. Only after engaging in dialogue with the minister was she able to see how the women perceived her questions as racist and why they were afraid to share their stories to begin with. It was great to see how a researchers was able to be as spontaneous as she was to change her agenda around 100% in order to find access to the women and through that, they finally opened up to her as well. Beautiful.

Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

  The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist  at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...
Read more