A medical anthropologist based in the School of Public Health, Andy has become an expert in Fulani science. The Fulani are nomadic pastoralists who live dispersed in seven West African countries (Andy is most familiar with the Fulani who live in Guinea's capital Conakry) -- what sense does it make to say that they have a 'science' of their own?
In his careful reconstruction of Fulani beliefs about Malaria and other diseases, Andy discovered that these are not isolated folk-beliefs, that they are not merely consistent with one another, but that they are guided by general principles which organize and interpret particular empirical knowledge in a systematic fashion and relate it to more general cultural values. If one fails to recognize the scientific character of these beliefs, Andy argues, one fails to engage the Fulani, and this failure makes it so much more difficult for their acceptance of Western treatment methods.
Andy's reconstruction recognizes four levels at which knowledge is organized. He arrives at these levels by following the example of phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty who reconstruct collective representations of 'body,' 'space,' or 'time' from ordinary discourse, linguistic structures, and the representation of elementary personal experience within these linguistic structures. As opposed to these philosophers, however, Andy is less concerned with universal structures (what it means to be a body in space), but interested instead how local cultures articulate very specific notions of body, time, and space, e.g., what it means to have a Fulani body in regard to physiologically interior and geographically exterior Fulani space.
Origin stories tell how people see themselves. They provide the most general level for the organization of knowledge, namely a sense of identity. According to their origin stories, the Fulani are outsiders to where they live: they are, and so is their body, out of place in Africa. The origin stories yield meta-schemas, i.e., first principles or rules of knowledge which generate more specific rules (the meta-schemas might also be called command-schemas and correspond roughly to what Lyotard calls "meta-narratives" in his "report on [Western] knowledge"). For instance, the Fulani sense of being differentiated from the Africans with whom they live issues in a meta-schema which regulates their settlement patterns in accordance with the requirements of their frail and displaced bodies: Fulani settle into the landscape in privileged zones that are congenial to the traditional lives of nomadic pastoralists, i.e., of who they were or where they came from. While the meta-schemas begin to explain why the Fulani, and not others, are becoming sick, so-called master schemas provide a general way of thinking about common disease and how it affects the Fulani body. One such master schema declares that "hydraulic forces and resultant swelling in the environment are mirrored by the hydraulic forces and swellings in the body." Such master schemas further concretize the Fulani conviction that their body is particularly susceptible to disease in the wetness of the lowland which they now inhabit. Indeed, susceptibility to disease marks a true Fulani, since a true Fulani body remembers the dry highland from which it hails. All common disease results from the rising of liquid in the Fulani body, and this rise is brought on by the rising of water (e.g., the rainy season) in the environment. We are thus moving from master schemas to the particular schemas for a disease like Malaria. The schemas deal with specific causes and most suitable treatments of the disease. They tell us that the milk produced by cows who graze the wet grasses can bring on malaria, and that the purging of all slimy yellow liquid from the body can cure it. They also tell us that the fulminations of malaria are in precise synchrony with the coming and going of coldness and dampness.
Andy's reconstruction sheds interesting light on how these nested levels of knowledge are fortified. They are deeply entrenched in the semantic field of words like "bhuuri," "bhuubol," or "bhuurudan" - words which closely associate dampness, liquidity, and swelling with various disorders and diseases. Indeed, the tightly interrelated beliefs of the Fulani so strongly determine their way of seeing and knowing that they are "blinded" against empirical data which contradict their view. There is no indication, for example, that the onset of malaria is related to the rainy season: the cases of malaria are fairly evenly distributed throughout the year. While positivist philosophers of science would take this obstinacy as an indication that Fulani science is no science at all, others might argue that it shows just how powerful Fulani science is: it provides interpretive resources strong enough to 'explain away' an apparent contradiction.
Andy has just recently embarked on this line of questioning. For a more complete elaboration (with fascinating detail) of Andy's reconstructions, ask him for his manuscripts "Cultural Schemas, Malaria, and the Fulani of Guinea" or "Seeing like the Fulani: Background knowledge and meta-schemas for malaria and other problems."
Alfred Nordmann
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