Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia

Pino Schirippa is associate professor at Sapienza University of Rome.

• Chapter 1. Medicines at the stakes, some thoughts on the currents debateChapter 2. The medical system in TigrayChapter 3. The social actors in the market of medicines in TigrayChapter 4. Tactics, paradoxes, and inequalities

Italian anthropologist Schirripa describes and analyzes the "plural" system of medical care in Ethiopia (where different therapeutic traditions compete), adopting the term "medicine" to include all materials used for such care, whether produced by traditional means or synthesized as modern pharmaceuticals. Having spent six years in Tigray observing medical care, including care as delivered by traditional healers and as obtained through biomedical agency, and having interviewed numerous subjects including family members, religious healers, and herbalists, Schirripa provides an excellent discussion of traditional medicine in Ethiopia, exposing influences from many continents. Schirripa emphasizes that recourse to one type of medicine does not necessarily express ideology, but is influenced by financial constraints within a context of inequality. For example, he contrasts two interview scenarios: one of a poor family with one HIV-positive child who receives free medical care and appropriate medications; another involving a child with severe mental and physical disabilities who receives almost no help except for his family's love and the herbs grown by his grandmother. . . Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.