Healing is as healing does: Pragmatic resolution of misfortune among the Senufo (Ivory Coast)

Using the example of the representations and practices relative to the resolution of misfortune among the Senufo Fodonon, this article aims to show the non‐autonomy and irrelevance of categories such as ‘therapeutic,’ ‘illness,’ ‘medicine,’ usually taken for granted by anthropology.

These activities and representations refer to — and depend on for their coherence — heterogeneous domains of social organization extrinsic to ‘illness,’ in biomedicine's isolation of this concept. These domains consist of the matrilineage structure, the form of initiation institutions, the logic of secrecy, and the unobservable ‘religious’ entities which are fluctuating and transformable (ancestors, spirits, twins, etc.) amongst which the possible causalities of the misfortune are selected.

Following the stages of the “therapeutic processes,”; the first part describes one of two aspects — the procedures and institutions concerning the resolution of illness — and shows that they form a sub‐set of the local ways of treating the ‘event’ in general.

The second part describes the other aspect: the logic of possible causalities and the modalities of connection with the “therapeutic”; register. Far from being homogeneous, totalizable, mutually informative, these two domains, composite and paradoxical, are actualized and unified in concrete therapeutic procedures whose particular form and content are determined by constraints which are primarily pragmatic, issuing from historical situations peculiar to these individuals and groups.