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An ethnography of the Takiwasi Clinic - Solving drug addiction with the help of non-humans.


Web link: www.neip.i...

Abstract

At first, the identity of a structure such as Takiwasi seems difficult to understand, both the representations that make it draw from multiple and disparate sources. It has, however, been apparent that the theme of spiritual struggle was the spine of representations, the node that unites them and guarantees the coherence necessary for practice. The treatment of drug addiction is implicitly conceived as part of the vast struggle against evil in its Christian sense, whose stakes are nothing but salvation or damnation of men. This theme is not alien to etiology and therapeutic options, which we have seen are characterized by the introduction of a spiritual dimension. Drug abuse is thus conceived as a result of a violation of laws that regulate the use of the sacred access. This theme is not alien to etiology and therapeutic options, which we have seen are characterized by the introduction of a spiritual dimension. Drug abuse is thus conceived as a result of a violation of laws that regulate the use of the sacred access. Therefore, healing will ultimately consist of rehabilitating the subject in the place that it belongs to him in interrelations with the spiritual bodies that are populating the invisible world. As we have seen, drug treatment is considered an initial path of the patient, which will involve gradual recognition with spirituality. These representations provide the diversity of the therapeutic techniques used in Takiwasi with the coherence necessary for practice of non-human interaction, however, humans remain the main artificial. The therapeutic use of the relationship to non-humans implies that interaction control, avoid or minimize the harmful effects of it and divert to humans the powers of their interlocutors. It is therefore necessary for Takiwasi therapists to use techniques to control these interactions, which mobilize the ritual dimension in the treatment of drug abuse. Similarly, communication of patients with non-humans is always accompanied by work of narration and narration, which includes interrogation and determination of the meaning of the content of the interaction. It seems therefore that while treatment effectively mobilizes non-human aid, their intervention remains framed by humans, who exercise their control through ritual and speeches of interactions. It is conceived that this position of placing the spiritual world and interactions with non-human entities that populate it at the heart of etiology and drug care can only be marginalized, rejected on the periphery of the social system, in a culture such as ours, where the design and treatment of this disease results from the transplantation of the concepts and medical methods, themselves determined by the mechanistic and materialistic orientation of modern science. Anthropology, which applies to the unity and identity of all men, is intended, beyond the study of the individual, to propose general reflections on human culture. The Takiwasi clinic, thanks to the mix of performances held there, seems particularly likely to reveal intercultural elements. Thus, examining the springs of symbolic efficiency in Takiwasi’s Métis context seems to have revealed the contours of a substrate of cross-cultural representations, of a baggage of common images to humanity, that rituals would be able to mobilize for practical and pragmatic acts. The treatment of Takiwasi-specific drug addiction highlights the very human need to respond to misfortune, to attribute significance to suffering and evil, and thus manifests human capacity to invent unprecedented responses to a human condition marked by the anxiety of death, confrontation with suffering and disease. Finally, Takiwasi’s option to address the shortcomings of human condition seems to illustrate the continuance of the initiative themes and their exceptional update power. The extreme vitality of the initiative motive, which appears as a fundamental modality of human existence, is rooted in the fact that initiation gives death and disease a positive function. The continuation of the initiative themes and their exceptional updating power would thus express the need for man to attribute a positive meaning to suffering and disease, accepting it as a transition to a mode of superiority, a human requirement illustrated by the treatment of drug abuse in Takiwasi.