ABSTRACT
“The meaning of illness”: the expression itself should be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, and this is true in any society, illness poses a problem, which requires interpretation. It must have a meaning if men are to have any hope of overcoming it. But this “meaning of illness”, this interpretation developed within a society, can itself be studied and interpreted from a variety of viewpoints and that variety is duplicated in societies whose academic tradition has allotted its observation to different disciplines; to ethnology, for example, the observation of line-age-based societies; to sociology, that of industrial societies. The fact that these distinctions today are to a certain extent called into question is of little importance. They encourage a questioning of the relationships between the respective methods and objectives of the different disciplines. So the object before us here would be, so to speak, doubly duplicated. The local interpretation of illness is one thing, but it is quite possible that the interpretation of this interpretation could vary, depending on whether it was the product of different methods (anthropological, sociological, historical) or on whether it was applied to different societies. The situation may become even more complicated, since the question can always be raised as to whether types of method and types of society are mechanically linked, whether one type of society implies one type of method. Let us further confuse the issue by adding that ill, illness and ill-fortune are not a priori identical concepts. The very ambiguity of the term “ill”, which can be taken in the physico-biological sense or in the moral and Christian sense, itself raises the historical problem of the transition from a perception of disease to an awareness of ill, a perception and an awareness which are far from being one and the same thing in those societies which have no great difficulty in establishing the disease-ill-fortune equation and simply treat illness from the intellectual point of view as one particular form of ill fortune.
