spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

5. Research methodology
When embarking on the study of health, one very basic but difficult-to-answer question arises:
what is health? Health is a subject that emerges in daily conversations, in political debate on
health insurance, in newspaper articles on Africa, in recipes for food, in sports magazines, in fact
in nearly every aspect of everyday life. But what is health exactly? This research is based on the
assumption that health is multi-dimensional, which means that one’s definition of health depends
on one’s socio-cultural context, age, gender, financial situation and religious frame of reference.
This understanding of health as a product of one’s particular experiences and cultural concepts,
turns ‘health’ into a social construct: the definition of health is determined by the internal rules,
regulations and institutions that are meaningful to a particular social group in society. This
automatically means that there are multiple understandings of health within one society, even
though there is generally one dominant understanding of healing. The medical understanding of
health, for example, is a very familiar frame of reference in most societies. Yet, besides this
dominant discourse, there are also other perspectives on healing. Usually these are labeled as
‘alternative’ medicine, but that is primarily a matter of one’s perspective. African traditional
healing, Chinese medicine and Native-American medicine are all examples of other health
discourses, that co-exist with the biomedical discourse. The implication of health as a social
construct is that there is no health construction that is not ‘legitimate’, since each health
conception generates its own understanding of what is true about health and healing (cf. Porter
1997:33-43). Social constructivism is thus the epistemological frame of this study. The relevance
of social constructivism to this study is that it offers new opportunities for Reformed theology to
reflect on healing, because it starts with contextual understandings of healing. As such, the major
benefit of a social constructivist approach is the broadening of the scope of healing for
theological reflection. Chapter one is a substantiation of this theoretical frame of reference, and
provides the foundation of this study on health and healing in the African context.
If a theological response to the African believers’ quest for healing is to be meaningful,
contextual and interdisciplinary approaches are required. The contextual nature of health asks for
an approach that does not confine the subject of health to the realm of biomedicine, clinics and
the individual body. Rather, it seeks the recognition of the socio-cultural elements of health,
which means that health is also rooted in interpersonal relationships, religious practices, spiritual
matters, environmental circumstances and societal situations. The existence of various health
discourses is an affirmation of this contextuality of health. The contextual nature of health,
therefore, needs to be considered when responding theologically to issues of health and healing.
The highly interdisciplinary nature of health asks for an approach that does not discuss the
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