Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia

Italian anthropologist Schirripa describes and analyzes the "plural" system of medical care in Ethiopia (where different therapeutic traditions compete), adopting the term "medicine" to include all materials used for such care, whether produced by traditional means or synthesized as modern pharmaceuticals. Having spent six years in Tigray observing medical care, including care as delivered by traditional healers and as obtained through biomedical agency, and having interviewed numerous subjects including family members, religious healers, and herbalists, Schirripa provides an excellent discussion of traditional medicine in Ethiopia, exposing influences from many continents. Schirripa emphasizes that recourse to one type of medicine does not necessarily express ideology, but is influenced by financial constraints within a context of inequality. For example, he contrasts two interview scenarios: one of a poor family with one HIV-positive child who receives free medical care and appropriate medications; another involving a child with severe mental and physical disabilities who receives almost no help except for his family's love and the herbs grown by his grandmother. . . Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * Choice Reviews *
“Refusing the great divide between traditional medicine and biomedicine, Pino Schirippa takes us into the fascinating world of medicines, both herbal and synthetic, in Ethiopia. Through this incursion into a plural medical universe, where various therapeutic traditions compete, he skillfully initiates a stimulating reflection on the issue of inequalities in access to care.” -- Sylvie Fainzang, National Institute of Health and Medical Research - France
“Pino Schirripa presents the reader with an amazingly comprehensive ethnography of the ways in which both traditional and synthetic medicines are produced, distributed, prescribed, and used in Ethiopia, unraveling the historical processes, knowledge systems, and power relations that shape these practices. Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia builds on decades of engagement with these issues in Ethiopia — offering the reader the best of what long-term fieldwork has to offer.” -- Anita Hardon, University of Amsterdam