I often explain that, to my idiosyncratic anthropological thinking (a gaze of sorts), the work of medical scientists and, say, the indigenous healer among the Bongo-Bongo (mythical tribal group) is that the Bongo-Bongo healer shakes his chicken at the moon with his left hand and US medical scientists use their right hand.
Sometimes folks think I am being critical here (to one or the other group here), but I am only pointing to the underlying cultural contexts within which all their activities take place. And within those cultural contexts, each is as meaningful as the other (culture = “that which goes without saying because it comes without saying.” P. Bourdieu, 1977)
One of the reasons an anthropologist might make that claim is on the basis of looking at the kinds of communication and interaction that take place through a common framework. Not all anthropologist share the same one, so makes for a better range of opinions. I am very interested in the nature of ‘signs,’ defined as ‘something that means something to someone in some context’ and, for the most part, function as a semiotician sorting through the kinds of signs that are meaningful in medicine and science at developing navigational tools, a kind of map making, for folks who want to get from one place to another (think of a salesperson trying to talk to a clinician). I will get back to that last point, somewhere in this bricolage.
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