Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Bauer, Gordon

Keywords

Placebos, Iquitos, Peru, Rituals

Area of Concentration

Biological Psychology

Abstract

Placebo effects can be used to explain the effectiveness of ritual healing. The evidence supporting the effectiveness of rituals and positive affective responses are due to neurobiological studies on placebo effects that point to the activation of the descending opioid and dopaminergic neural systems. Using Kaptchuk’s (2011) proposal of a ritual approach to understand the placebo phenomenon, I argue that placebo ritual theory can help explain how language, culture and metaphor affect physiological processes. Research for this thesis took place in Iquitos, Peru—the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon. Qualitative research was performed using semi-structured interviews and participant-observations. Healers and practitioners of the traditional healing system of curanderismo were interviewed to gain an understanding of the elements of healing (e.g. etiology of sickness, treatments, ritual ceremonies) present in this system. With this information, a discursive bridge was developed to link placebo neurobiological studies with the elements present in Peruvian curanderismo.

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