Movement among healers in Sri Lanka: A case study of a sinhalese patient

Sinhalese patients in Sri Lanka have a variety of practitioners to choose from in seeking treatment for illness. These include: Ayurvedic physicians, Western physicians, and ritual practitioners. This paper traces the movement of a single patient seeking treatment for pissu (madness) from a number of healers. It is suggested that this movement of the patient among a variety of treatment systems allows a fluidity of diagnosis which prevents any one explanatory system from dominating her perception of her illness. It is also argued that treatments are linked by an underlying continuity of process, in which the personal antecedents of the illness are reinterpreted in terms of public representations of affliction and in which all treatments phrase illness most basically in terms of excess and imbalance.This paper was originally represented to an Anthropology Department colloquium at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in the fall of 1977. I would like to thank the following people for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the paper: H. L. Seneviratne, Brenda Beck, David Landy, Nancy Waxler, Arthur Kleinman, Charles Ducey, Daniel Brown, John McCreery, and Allan Meyers.