Ethnomedical Implications of Wierzbicka’s Theory and Method

Wierzbicka’s Theory and Method

Three decades of empirical research enabled Wierzbicka and coworkers to perfect an objective way of studying language and thought. Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is based on self-evident, self-explanatory concepts which all natural languages build on. Such conceptual primes, Wierzbicka and coworkers have concluded, represent foundations or building blocks of all languages beyond which it is methodologically difficult to go deeper into (“get under”). Hence, her formulation that NSM represents a “lexicon and syntax of human subjectivity”. Because NSM embodies foundational units of meaning it enables comparison of ideas represented in natural languages and cultures across the world. It exemplifies a prelinguistic readiness for articulation of meaning about phenomena like pain.

Wierzbicka on Pain

Wierzbicka (2012) stresses the importance of appraising pain in clinical medicine. Because of cultural and linguistic biases, clinicians are impeded in understanding a sufferer’s pain. She argues that cross-linguistic, cross-cultural sensitivity is needed. She demonstrates how through NSM one can get at essential meanings clinicians want to know about. Her method targets both mental and physical pain, making it relevant to psychiatry and general medicine, respectively.

Wierzbicka and Ethnomedicine

NSM is equally applicable to sickness, a central concept about morbidity of disease. It embodies three logically separate topics: (a) the phenomenon or condition itself, a human universal which can be formulated in terms of NSM as “something bad is happening to me (my body) which I don’t want”; (b) concepts and beliefs about pain and sickness which all peoples have evolved and employ to think about the phenomenon (e.g., its causes, significance); (c) natural linguistic formulations (e.g., words, morphemes, phrases) and associated rules which speakers share and use to communicate about pain and control its effects (healing).

Anthropologists and historians of medicine have documented the diverse interpretations that peoples across space and time have had about sickness and healing (Fabrega, 1974, 1997). The comparative study of medicine is through ethnomedical science (Fabrega, 1975). A schema of concepts and propositions derived from them which explain the logic and function of ideas and beliefs about sickness and healing constitute a theory about ethnomedicines worldwide. Such a theory would derive from and be reducible to dicta of NSM.

Wierzbicka and Biological and Cultural Evolution of Human Behavior

NSM exemplifies the semantic information (conceptual primes) which enabled language-ready brains of Homo sapiens to describe and communicate about matters relevant to fitness and well-being. It provides a way of formulating how sickness and healing were understood during later phases of human biological evolution. This was the time during which the biological capacity for intentional and communicative sharing of human subjectivity (i.e., culture) was consolidating (Tomasello, 1999). NSM enables understanding of how the morbidity of disease was reasoned about through universal semantic and grammatical primes based on self-perceptions and observation of behavior of group mates. Thus, it provides a handle with which to grip the beginnings of the culture of medicine (i.e., ethnomedicine) and its evolution thereafter (the ratchet effect of cumulative cultural evolution; Tomasello, 1999).

Wierzbicka and the Early Evolution of Medicine

A precedent for using NSM to study animal communication and cognition has been formulated by Wierzbicka (2004). Nonsocial animals and mammals exhibit health maintenance and health promotion behaviors which are sometimes difficult to untangle from sickness, and healing (Engel, 2002). When observed showing sickness, chimpanzees (exemplars of the last common ancestor of man and apes) exhibit group-specific self-medication routines (Huffman, 2006). The behaviors resemble Wierzbicka’s “making a bad condition of body good.” They are seemingly intentional efforts to seek relief from sickness and pain. They mirror concepts but are not necessarily conscious. Such behaviors are found to differ in isolated chimpanzee communities, and are defined as a tradition. Self-medication in chimpanzees exemplifies aspects of mind and minding involving recognition and amelioration of sickness. It can be construed as emergence of a cognitive search for meaning of “sickness” empowered or triggered by evolutionary imperatives (Fabrega, 1997). From a broad vantage point, chimpanzee self-medication constitutes an arguable baseline and “take-off point” (or phylogenetic precursor) for cultural instantiation and subsequent evolution of ethnomedicine (Fabrega, 2011).

Summary and Conclusion

Wierzbicka’s NSM enables one to get inside the heads of hominins as they acquired resources for representing and sharing ideas, beliefs, and actions for explaining and coping with “bad, unwanted things happening to me,” phenomena which hindered pursuit of personal security. It facilitated adaptive behaviors which promoted fitness. Communicating and acting upon such ideas within relatively closed groups represent hallmarks of the early evolution of medicine. It is reasonable to infer that initial language for this involved a high level of esotericism (Wray & Grace, 2007), and lexical and syntactic structures mirrored the logic of social exchange (Knight, Studdert-Kennedy, & Hurford, 2000). Finer points of ethnomedicine emerged gradually during the Middle to Early Pleistocene transition. Once language got off the ground in some form or another (e.g., mimesis, protolanguage, holographic segments), cognitive resources enabled later hominins to accumulate knowledge about how to make “bad things” in (or of) one’s body, or “bad thoughts/feelings,” “go away.” A theory about the evolution of ethnomedicine would balance and integrate culturally affirmative and evolutionarily affirmative vantage points. In other words, important features of a cultural, helping, or clinical approach are emphases on personal and morally saturated considerations (e.g., values, healing, caring), whereas those of an evolutionary approach are emphases on natural, objective, and impersonal ones (e.g., natural selection, fitness, adaptation). A coherent and comprehensive theory about evolution of ethnomedicine should integrate these contrastive sets of considerations to the extent that this is logically and semantically possible (see Fabrega, 2002, 2006).