An investigation into the phenomena and practices of spiritual ...

A bricoleur is the French word for the kind of village odd-job or handyman who keepsevery odd nut, screw or piece of wood or metal he can lay his hands on, and if anythingbreaks down in the village he can generally fix it from the old spare parts that he hashoarded.Lévi-Strauss said that the general method of primitive healers in simple societies was likethat of those bricoleurs: basically, use anything that works. A few herbs, animal grease,magic mushrooms, prayers, music, manipulation; and if it ever seems to work on anythingonce, remember to try it again just in case. Above all, put on a serious, confident air tomake the clients believe you know what you are doing, since their belief is half the battle -the placebo effect IS very powerful - taking a placebo does produce a better outcome thandoing nothing.Lévi-Strauss contrasted this primitive method with modern science, (which he believedwas guided by Cartesian rationality). The modern sociology of science, however, fromthe detailed historical examination by Thomas Kuhn (1970) of how slowly and partiallyEinstein‟s theory of relativity spread in the 1920s, to Michael Mulkay‟s (1991)painstaking laboratory ethnographies, shows us that actually scientists are still doingbricolage, except they call it by the politer philosophical term "pragmatism".Lévi-Strauss (1963) in his essay „The effectiveness of Symbols‟ himself maps the practicesof the Cuna nele (healer) onto contemporary psychoanalytic practice, while Littlewood andDein (2000), follow others in examining whether this is a kind of general comparisonbetween “shamanism” and medical science, or whether it is just saying that psychoanalysisis not better than faith-healing. My research shows that in the world of spiritual2