Order and healing: the concept of order and its importance in the conceptualization of healing.

Summary

This paper argues that the concept of order is central to healing and proposes a model placing order at the heart of the healing process. Drawing on Javanese mystical practices that emphasize the unity of human and natural orders, it uses this example as a metaphor for an expanded notion of order. The paper examines how order is understood in medical anthropology, science, and medicine, and discusses the role of analogy and metaphor in conceptualizing order across cognitive and biological domains. This perspective challenges conventional biomedical categories and offers a basis for reconceptualizing developments in fields like psychoneuroimmunology.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper concerns the notion of order and its role in the conceptualization of healing, and therefore its importance to healing itself. It proposes a model of healing in which order is central. The paper begins with an example drawn from Javanese mystical practices which are based upon the concept of the unity of the human and natural orders. The Javanese case provides a metaphor for an expanded notion of order. This prefigures a consideration of the nature of the concept of order in medical anthropology, science, and medicine. The importance of the notion of analogy (and metaphor) in the concept of order and how order may be simultaneously conceptualized in both cognitive and biological domains is also discussed in the paper. The perspective on order and healing developed here goes beyond conventional biomedical categories and provides a basis for the fundamental reconceptualizations necessary for addressing contemporary developments in psychoneuroimmunology, for example.