ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author turns to a discussion of the themes which have emerged relating to Wimbum culture. He returns to medical anthropology and round off the discussion on the idea of the medical system. In a provocative article Maxwell Owusu criticises Western anthropology, and in particular the ethnography of Africa, which he finds to be largely inadequate. He claims that anthropological ‘theories’ are eurocentric: they are ‘well established, fairly orthodox Western views of society and culture, their origins and development, which are then applied to the whole of humanity’. Owusu criticises the slender basis on which many anthropologists generalise about Africa but he himself makes sweeping generalisations about anthropologists who study Africa. The study started with an exploration of indigenous conceptions relating to the biomedically defined syndrome kwashiorkor.
