Main concept
Healways
Healways refers to the tangible practices, customs, beliefs, and conceptual frameworks that shape how individuals and communities understand and manage illness, health, and healing. The term has been developed to capture the specific medical cultures of a given time and place through the analysis of their enactments.
As an analytical category, healways is grounded in historical anthropology. It is a useful tool for analyzing the temporally and culturally situated nature of healing traditions because of its “snapshot” quality. It prioritizes the emic perspective, that is, the insiders perspective.
One of the strengths of the concept lies in its flexibility: it allows for the identification of specific healways making it possible to analyze overlapping or coexisting medical systems in their full complexity.
Exploring culturally situated healways requires a focus on daily life, the healer–healed relationship, as well as the everyday enactment of practices and ideas surrounding health and disease. By requiring close attention to human interactions and medical practices as lived experiences, healways facilitates a deeper understanding of how healing is embedded in specific cultural and social environments.
The concept of healways, proposed by Matilde Carbajo[1], draws on a range of influences from historical research, historical anthropology, and anthropology of disease. Its genealogy involves the concept of “medical cultures” introduced in J. Pardo-Tomás’ work; the concept of “aetiological-therapeutic models” proposed by F. Laplantine; and, especially, W. Davies work on the Navajo healing environments that served the Diné peoples.
Healways shares conceptual ground with “foodways”, widely used in the archaeological and historical research on the Mariana Islands. Like foodways, healways highlights the integration of practices, material culture, ideas, and social relationships in everyday life.
[1] Carbajo, Matilde (2025) Healways in the Mariana Islands. Medicine, colonialism, and spirituality during the Latte period and Spanish colonial rule, c. 1000-1769 CE
Aberigua more
The following is merely a selection, and we apologize for any omissions. If you, dear reader, notice any missing references, please let us know so that we may include them.
- Matilde Carbajo, Healways in the Mariana Islands. Medicine, colonialism, and spirituality during the Latte period and Spanish colonial rule, c. 1000-1769 CE. Doctoral Thesis (Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2025)
- Darlene Moore, Foodways in the Mariana Islands: A Look at the Pre-Contact Period, Journal of Indo-Pacific Archaeology 37 (2015): 49–58.
- François Laplantine, Anthropologie de la maladie: étude ethnologique des systèmes de représentations étiologiques et thérapeutiques dans la société occidentale contemporaine, Bibliothèque scientifique Payot (Paris: Payot, 1992)
- José Pardo-Tomás, ‘Antiguamente Vivían Más Sanos Que Ahora’: Explanations of Native Mortality in the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias, in Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire, ed. John Slater, María Luz López Terrada, and José Pardo-Tomás, New Hispanisms (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014)
- Peña-Filiu, Alimentación y colonialismo en las islas Marianas (Pacífico occidental): Introducciones, adaptaciones y transformaciones alimentarias durante la misión jesuita (1668-1769). Doctoral Thesis (Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2019)
- Wade Davies, Healing Ways: Navajo Health Care in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009)
