“It’s two things mixed together!” : A Baptist missionary nurse and her symbiotic relationship with Ndyuka medicine

• Main Author: van der Bent, Maarten
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för kulturantropologi och etnologi 2017
• Subjects: missionary medicine; Ndyuka medicine; interaction; symbiosis; ‘othering’
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-314772

This thesis analyses the interaction between missionary medicine and Ndyuka medicine from the perspective of a Baptist missionary nurse operating a clinic in the village of Lantiwei in Suriname. Based on two months of anthropological fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2014, this thesis argues that in her everyday practice of medicine, the Baptist nurse is dependent on the cooperation of a local Ndyuka healer and his family to such an extent that their working together can be regarded as a social form of symbiosis. This thesis furthermore demonstrates that the Baptist nurse has incorporated Ndyuka ideas to her understanding of illness and death, and that even though she continues to abhor and reject the practice of Ndyuka medicine as a form of devil worship, she recognizes its spiritual powers. Taken together, these findings show that an opposition between missionary medicine as a—perhaps unwitting—agent of modernity and local Ndyuka medicine as a ‘traditional’ form of medicine increasingly superseded by ‘modern’ medicine, is fictitious, and that the lack of scholarly attention to the interaction of missionary medicine with local practices of medicine demontrates anthropology’s obsession with the ‘traditional’ ‘Other’.