ТРАДИЦИОННАТА МЕДИЦИНА (КУЛТУРНО-ТИПОЛОГИЧНИ ОСОБЕНОСТИ)
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE (CULTURAL AND TYPOLOGICAL SPECIFITY)

Summary/Abstract: The medical experience of humankind may be classified in two main groups: scientific and traditional (prescientific and parascientific). Traditional medical experience has its own socio-cultural space (different from the space of scientific medicine), its own bearers, consumers, a social group, approving of it, its own methods and instruments. Traditional medicine is a subsystem of traditional culture as a type of culture system and it is in the subject area of ethnology (socio-cultural anthropology). An inherent (constituent) feature of traditional medicine is the ability of self-recreation, to preserve its own internal unity on the basis of the archaic paradigm of the identity (isomorphism) of macro- and microcosmos. The indications "rationality/irrationality", "efficacy/inefficacy" and the mechanisms of translation are not reliable at an attempt of typology of this phenomenon. The second (constituent) indicative of traditional medicine is its status of "Locus spei" in the occasions when scientific medicine is helpless (the so called "useless doctor visiting"). The universal in syntagmatic and paradigmatic senses medical ritual (semantically equivalent to the cosmogonic mith and ritual) is basic to all ethnic forms of traditional medical experience. Despite the alternativity of traditional and scientific medicine, the border between them is passable in both directions, because this border exists in human minds, keeping both types of experience. The translation of means and methods in both directions does not destroy the type of these two systems and the borrowing is possible through deformation of the taken element in correspondence to the paradigmatics of the accepting system.

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