Pollution and Paradigms

Abstract

As S. B. Barnes (I969) remarks, the work of Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss and Horton has combined to narrow the gap between 'primitive' and 'scientific' thought as this difference had been defined by Frazer and Levy-Bruhl. Barnes himself adduces T. S. Kuhn's Structure of scientific revolutions (I962) as evidence that scientists are in fact more 'primitive' in their thinking than their public self-image allows-thus narrowing the gap still further. In the present article I approach the general question of the primitive/scientific relation, or disjunction, by seeing how far Kuhn's concept of the 'scientific paradigm' is appropriate to indigenous theories of causation of disease among what is still substantially a non-literate society, that of the Fipa of south-west Tanzania. Putting the question in this way reveals that there are two identifiable indigenous models of sickness causation among the Fipa, who are primarily agriculturalists and number about go,ooo. The first model is general among the ordinary people, and I propose to call it the 'lay' or 'folk' theory. The second model is peculiar to a small category of specialists, numbering perhaps 500, who are called asiyaanga (s., siyaanga), or 'doctors'. These are men who have acquired the craft of indigenous medicine through years of apprenticeship to an acknowledged master.' It is the model of sickness causation they hold which, as I hope to show, deserves to be called a 'paradigm' in the sense of Kuhn's definition of 'universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners' (I962: Viii).