Alternative Medicine as Counter-Conduct: Therapeutic Spaces and Medical Rationality in Contemporary Romania

• Authors: Corina Rusu
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This study analyses the practice of medical pluralism in contemporary Romania, addressing the phenomenon of alternative medicine through the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Employing in-depth interviews with general and alternative practitioners from two towns in Transylvania, and participant observations in spaces where they practice their knowledge, I describe how certain discursive acts reformulate the body and the subject-patient. Alternative therapists construct their practice in direct opposition to several parameters of biomedicine, such as the logic of diagnosis, treatment, and the praxis of patient’s visit to the general practitioner’s office, discussed in the paper. They define their approach as psychosomatic, and set-up the medical space as a confessional space, envisioning a holistic corporeality and the idea of the “inner doctor” in each patient. This conduct would supposedly make the subject “active” and “empowered”, as opposed to the “passive” patient succumbed to the diagnosis of conventional doctors.

Keywords

EN

counter-conduct; biomedicine; alternative medicines; patient subject

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 5-20

Dates

published

2015-12-01

online

2016-01-29

Contributors

author

Corina Rusu

• MA in Applied Anthropology at the Babeș-Bolyai University and MA in Psychosomatic Medicine at the “Iuliu Hațieganu” University of Medicine, Cluj-Napoca

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/subbs-2015-0007