ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with theory, the development of a framework to shape analysis of the subject matter – women healing. Medical anthropological studies have shown that healing is a process which includes making meaning of life's lesions. Si[gh]ting gender in a study of healing cannot lead simply to an add women/add gender and stir approach. Both women and men have been engaged in the healing process but often in quite different ways depending on how gender functioned within the meaning-making processes in their contexts. In developing a postcolonial perspective that will function interactively with the feminist, the chapter seeks to develop categories of analysis which will enable the multicultural aspects of women healing in the Graeco-Roman world and early Christianity to emerge. Just as women have been constructed to serve the 'master' paradigm by their very negation so too has 'the native', 'the primitive', the colonized.
