- Title
- Traditional healing as social practice: an ethnographic study of communicative practices in engagements between traditional healers and their clients in Maseru, Lesotho
- Creator
- Molefe, Stanley
- Subject
- Ethnology -- Lesotho
- Subject
- Healers -- Lesotho
- Date
- 2015-02
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10353/26152
- Identifier
- vital:64926
- Description
- Practices of traditional healing may be studied as an accomplishment of healers and their clients in talk-in-interaction together. An ethnomethodological perspective on traditional healing brings the researcher to focus on the taken-for-granted ‘folk methods’, or ‘ethnomethods’ that participants in healing practices use to understand each other, and so to bring about the social practice that is conventionally recognized as traditional healing. This thesis analyses transcripts of three Sesotho healers’ (bo-makherenkhoa) consultations with their clients in Maseru, Lesotho. The researcher adopted an ethnographic approach to studying the situations in which participants performed each ritual; and having made field notes and recorded these sessions on an audio device, used ethnomethodological conversation analysis to reveal in what way these sessions constitute and represent practices of Sesotho traditional healing. Despite the apparently dissimilar procedures used by each healer, the analysis found each session to comprise of a diving sequence and a consultation sequence. Each session was also remarkably ordered, using recognized patterns of talk discovered by conversation analysis. Traditional healing is a practical accomplishment between its participants. A practice can be defined as an established social pattern of ‘doings and sayings’. While the three sessions were found to have different uses of divining bones and uttering of prayers to ancestors, the conversation analyses demonstrate that sufficient similarity exists between these sessions to identify them as instances of a Sesotho traditional healing. While paradigm ethnomethodology and the method of conversation analysis are both referred to as forming part of the social constructionist perspective in Communication Studies, there are very few examples of studies that actually use the method or the paradigm. This thesis attempts to demonstrate the value of using these in the field of Communication.
- Description
- Thesis (MSoc.C) -- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2015
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (142 pages)
- Format
- Publisher
- University of Fort Hare
- Publisher
- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
- Language
- English
- Rights
- rights holder
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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UFH Department of Communication
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Molefe Thesis Final.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |