Search

This article offers an epistemological, poetic, and ontological reading of the ways of knowing regarding mental disorders that are characteristic of the traditional healers (curanderas and curanderos) of an Indigenous group in Mexico. The study is based on ethnographic interviews with traditional Purépecha (Tarascan) healers in rural Michoacan. Interviews focused on local conceptions of emotional and mental illness, especially Nervios, Susto, and Locura (nerves, fright, and madness). We discuss the conceptual structure of these Indigenous illness notions, the nature of the associated imagery and notions of the soul, as well as the general sense of meaningfulness and reality implicit in Purépecha curanderismo. The highly metaphorical modes of understanding characteristic of these healers defy analysis in purely structuralist terms. They do, however, have strong affinities with the Renaissance "episteme" or implicit framework of understanding described in The Order of Things, Michel Foucault's classic study of modes of knowing and experiences of reality in Western thought—a work profoundly influenced by Heidegger's interest in the historical and cultural constitution of what Heidegger termed "Being." After examining the individual illness concepts, we explore both the poetic and the ontological dimension (the foundational sense of reality or of Being) that they involve, with special emphasis on supernatural concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the unknown history of the Hospital of La Rumorosa. The context will be rebuilt is the political future of the Northern Territory of Baja California during the first half of the twentieth century. After mentioning the origins and early settlement of the town of La Rumorosa, I will try to describe the emergence of the hospital. In order to place the demands that patients and philanthropic groups made to territorial authorities, this article presented some press releases. The center of the discussion will focus on representations and meanings that were the concepts of "madness" and "human being" for philanthropists who worked on behald of the Hospital of La Rumorosa. Finally, will emphasize those corruptions which plunged to patients in a cruel abandonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Manicomio General La Castañeda founded in 1910 at the outside of Mexico City, was the most important psychiatric institution of the xxth century in Mexico. When it was open, the families let there men and women whom had the requirement for being considered madness and in consequences, they where appropriate for having psychiatric treatment. In this article I explore the cultural bases of the therapeutic confinement through the imaginaries that the Mexican society of those days had about madness, its causes, symptoms and treatments. It analyzes both faces of madness: the one of the degenerate and the other of the nervous. Both references synthesize psychiatric terms and social variables as class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]