[Majorly edited] OK, I’ve come up with a clearer answer. But first let me spell out what I take your question to be: I understand you to be pointing out that tribes in Amazon, like all societies, that we might call “hygienic” or “healthful” and then asking if these can be described as ‘public health’.
My answer is that I cannot give you an answer a priori, but that the non-essentialism described above might give us a way of responding to it. We could start by taking a non-essentialistic approach to analysing various tribes’ and societies’ hygiene practices, carefully examining how they use their words to describe and organise the world. For each tribe or society studied, this would presumably reveal a conceptual-practical-organisational matrix of some kind (itself an ethnographer’s reification of a complex, shifting world, of course). The question would then be (1) whether these matrices are similar enough to warrant thinking that we are latching onto some human universal here [my bet is yes, fwiw] and (2) whether we should call them all ‘public health’ or whether we should find another term and reserve ‘public health’ for a particular modern, originally Western understanding of hygiene/health [on this, I’m agnostic and am willing to hear arguments either way, although I lean towards the latter option].
All tribes in history dealt with the practical issues of living, being sick, and dying as well as made sense of it somehow. Modern public health practitioners try, unsuccessfully so far, to impose a meaning making religion with a set of practices how to understand the meaning of suffering as well as how to subject yourself to alterations under a promise you will not die or be sick as health.
Alright, then this sounds like something that sets 'public health' apart from other understandings of living/sickness/dying, and so may be good grounds on which to reserve the term for our own specific, historically local understandings of them.
Most definitely. There is a tendency to re-write history through the meaning of modern ways and ideas, completely obliterating how many people before us suffered though realities of living in many different ways. Whig History method to impose a way of living and sense-making as well as replace customs within traditions that people successfully live out and maintain rather physically. It’s not a joke or philosophy.
Two good case studies would be:
Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge (aka how different peoples dealt with the issues of suffering and death practically within their traditions and customs; to note that smallpox was not masurika; there was no smallpox before we made it)
Merits of the Plague by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Bithl al-Māʿūn fī Akhbār al-Ṭāʿūn. We should not discount that how people speak affects how they think and live. Translation into English obliterates local meanings and connotations as they reflected physical ways of living as communities.
What is public health for the tribesmen in the Amazon forest? Or rather how do some tribesmen keep healthy? What would they tell us?
[Majorly edited] OK, I’ve come up with a clearer answer. But first let me spell out what I take your question to be: I understand you to be pointing out that tribes in Amazon, like all societies, that we might call “hygienic” or “healthful” and then asking if these can be described as ‘public health’.
My answer is that I cannot give you an answer a priori, but that the non-essentialism described above might give us a way of responding to it. We could start by taking a non-essentialistic approach to analysing various tribes’ and societies’ hygiene practices, carefully examining how they use their words to describe and organise the world. For each tribe or society studied, this would presumably reveal a conceptual-practical-organisational matrix of some kind (itself an ethnographer’s reification of a complex, shifting world, of course). The question would then be (1) whether these matrices are similar enough to warrant thinking that we are latching onto some human universal here [my bet is yes, fwiw] and (2) whether we should call them all ‘public health’ or whether we should find another term and reserve ‘public health’ for a particular modern, originally Western understanding of hygiene/health [on this, I’m agnostic and am willing to hear arguments either way, although I lean towards the latter option].
All tribes in history dealt with the practical issues of living, being sick, and dying as well as made sense of it somehow. Modern public health practitioners try, unsuccessfully so far, to impose a meaning making religion with a set of practices how to understand the meaning of suffering as well as how to subject yourself to alterations under a promise you will not die or be sick as health.
Alright, then this sounds like something that sets 'public health' apart from other understandings of living/sickness/dying, and so may be good grounds on which to reserve the term for our own specific, historically local understandings of them.
Most definitely. There is a tendency to re-write history through the meaning of modern ways and ideas, completely obliterating how many people before us suffered though realities of living in many different ways. Whig History method to impose a way of living and sense-making as well as replace customs within traditions that people successfully live out and maintain rather physically. It’s not a joke or philosophy.
Two good case studies would be:
Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge (aka how different peoples dealt with the issues of suffering and death practically within their traditions and customs; to note that smallpox was not masurika; there was no smallpox before we made it)
https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/WP17.pdf
Merits of the Plague by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Bithl al-Māʿūn fī Akhbār al-Ṭāʿūn. We should not discount that how people speak affects how they think and live. Translation into English obliterates local meanings and connotations as they reflected physical ways of living as communities.