The Sore That Does Not Heal: Cause and Concept in the Navajo Experience of Cancer

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Abstract
In comparison with biomedicine, Navajo traditional medicine has been characterized as having far less elaboration of specific disease categories and of specific causal attributions of illness. The Navajo experience with cancer provides an occasion to examine how a biomedical category and the attendant elements of causal reasoning are taken up and transformed in the Navajo system. The nature of Navajo causal reasoning about cancer is analyzed through comparison of data from Navajo and Anglo-American cancer patients. The problem of specificity in cause and concept is addressed with reference to Navajos' common attribution of cancer to exposure to lightning. Methodological issues in this area of cultural analysis are summarized in terms of conceptual distinctions between cause and symptom, between disease as entity or as process, between biomedical and traditional ethnomedical systems, and between body and mind.

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