spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

it is a key in addressing systems of power. This explains why Foucault himself used the term to
mean different things: “Instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word
‘discourse’, I believe I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general
domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes
as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements” (Foucault 1972:80). Despite the
complexity of meanings and the variety of applications, Foucault’s understanding of ‘discourse’
is not so much that ‘discourse’ is something that exists independently and as such can be
analyzed on its own, but rather that ‘discourse’ is something that comes into existence when it
generates something else: “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak”
(Foucault 1972:49).
In other words, the systemic structures of certain practices reveal the presence of a discourse, in
that there is a rather systematic or coherent pattern in how things are generated or influenced. So
any statement, concept, certain way of thinking or acting, image or anything else that is supposed
to be a true representation of reality, may affirm and renew the particular frame in which reality
is perceived if there is some effect or influence evolving from it. According to Foucault, the very
moment that the statement fits within that particular reality frame, and has an effect on
(some)one’s thoughts and practices, one can speak of a discourse, of a group of utterances or
statements which are regulated by the system they were born within.
The discursive structure itself (as the framework of thoughts, statements and behavior) is never
being questioned, for the framework itself is the mechanism that determines and produces
whatever is perceived as true within a culture. A clear example of how discourse generates and
influences the perception of what is true and real, is mentioned by Mills: the approach of
alternative knowledge about health from the perspective of the medical science discourse reveals
that much attention, time, money and research is dedicated to the defense of true and scientific
knowledge by denouncing alternative medicine as inferior and the work of unreliable quacks
(2004:16, referring to Fairclough 1992).
Besides the mechanism that safeguards the way people look at things, and the meanings they
attach to situations as true and according to reality, there are also notions of power and
knowledge that play an important role in a discourse. According to the Foucauldean perspective,
the word power needs a broader understanding than is conventional (that is, power as possession,
as a means of oppression, or as the result of economic relationships), because power is
something that is present the very moment people relate to each other. It is precisely in the social
relationship, in the power relation, that the individual is generated, that his or her behavior is
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