Most of us would readily recognize the Ihamba ceremony as a “ritual”—a designation we would not be so quick to apply to a mammogram or a biopsy. The word carries a pejorative weight that is not associated with, for example, the phrase “health care.” Early anthropologists could have called the healing practices of so-called primitive peoples “health care,” but they took pains to distinguish the native activities from the purposeful interventions of Euro-American physicians. The latter were thought to be rational and scientific, while the former were “mere” rituals, and the taint of imperialist
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