| 概要 |
It is well known that many traditional medical practitioners, such as so-called shamans and witchdoctors and medicine men, not only sometimes use tricks, but trickery even plays a central part of thei...r practices. This has caused many anthropologists uneasiness. Doesn’t this mean these healers are just frauds who take advantages of credulous backward people, which simply seems to support object of anthropological research? How could a certain central institution of a society just consist in fraud? This is why the anthropologists have tended to downplay trickery per se, regarding it, instead, as a kind of expressive act, paying more attention to what it says than what it does. What seems to us trickery here is the healers’ mimetic production, production ofan appearance of something extraordinary is happening. An example is famous extraction therapies practiced in many societies, where a healer, using a piece of charcoal hidden in his palm or a piece of down soaked in blood and hidden in his mouth, pretends to suck out ‘illness’ from inside a patient’s body. Of course nothing actually comes out of the patient’s body, only produced is an appearance as if these objects comes out from within his body. Isn’t it, then just a trick? In this paper I try to put this problem in a new perspective. Instead of seeing this type of practices in a trickery=lie=fraud versus reality=truth=honesty binary opposition, I first relocate them in a wider context of production of mimesis. Many so-called ‘ritual’ or ceremonial practices are know to contain some mimetic constructions, and both actors and audience often perfectly know what really is going on, and still there’s no question of calling them fraud. Next I criticize Levi-Strauss’ famous paper on this topic, ‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’ (Levi-Strauss 1972 (1958), which analyses how a skeptical young Kwakiutl man, while learning and practicing his ‘fraudulent’ healing techniques, came to be a self-confident shaman believing firmly effectiveness of his practice. Levi-Strauss’ answer to the problem seems to be a sort of self-deception on the part of the practitioner. I will show this conclusion was only possible by Levi-Strauss’s dubious manipulation of the original text. It will be shown, based on anthropological literature as well as my own field materials, those healers simply practice their healing technique as an effective art handed down (sometimes secretly) from their predecessors, and, as Levi-Strauss’ text rightly remarks, they are simply confident of their efficacy. Then why so much mimesis? I will argue the healing practice itself is a composite construction of practitioners’ points of view and the clients’ viewpoints, formed in an imaginary space of supernatural agencies, and how it can cause mimetic features prevail in these practices without the practitioners themselves consciously intending it. It is a consequence of a kind of Darwinian algorism (not biological evaluation) working in this imaginary space.続きを見る
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