Just shamans and healers or indigenous medical systems? A critical discourse analysis of the categories of shamans and healers as constructed by social science texts

"Just as even a single sentence has traditionally been taken to imply a whole language so a single discourse implies a whole society." Language and Power, N. Fairclough. This paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the categories of shamans and healers as they are constructed and produced by some social science texts. The CDA has three aims. First, it seeks to problematize how the categories of shamans and healers have been traditionally used to construct and produce what has been said about the medical systems of indigenous communities around the world. This is considered in the backdrop of opacity by mainstream social sciences to construct them as medical systems. Not only medical systems, they are social institutions that are part of their comprehensive cultural systems. Therefore, they are indigenous knowledge platforms that help to respond to questions of health and illness, life and death, nature and culture, science and philosophy. The categories of shamans and healers have been used as a way to state that the indigenous medical systems are not scientific systems but isolated knowledge and practices performed by individual shamans or healers. The second aim of this CDA is to examine the categories of shamans and healers in the context of the contemporary discussion on language, communication and discourse analysis and its various power relations as constructed in social science texts. The third aim is to demonstrate that there is a profound link among language, medicine and the social sciences and that it is impossible to continue in denial of this link. It is the assumption of the CDA that the constructed categories of shamanism and healers in the social sciences convey a specific bias of a logocentric and "scientificentric" worldview that could not construct a category of indigenous medical systems. It is posited that, through this CDA of the categories of shamans and healers, the local and global discursive practices that most societies hold about health and illness and body and 'mind/soul/spirit' can be understood through the ample category of medical systems

Success Factors in Peer-to-Business (P2B) Crowdlending: A Predictive Approach

Peer-to-Business (P2B) crowdlending is gaining importance among companies seeking funding. However, not all projects get the same take-up by the crowd. Thus, this study aims to determine the key factors that drive non-professional investors to choose a given loan in an online environment. To this purpose, we have analyzed 243 crowdlending campaigns on October.eu platform. We have obtained a series of variables from the analyzed loans using logistic regression. Results indicate that loan amount, loan term and overall credit rating are the key predictors of non-professional lender P2B crowdlending success. These findings may be useful for predicting whether the crowd will subscribe to a loan request or not. This information would help businesses to modify specific loan characteristics (if possible) to make their loans more attractive or could even lead companies to consider a different financial option. It could also help platforms select and adapt project parameters to secure their success

Strategic equilibrium in economies with a continuum of agents

In this note, a pure exchange economy with a continuum of agents who behave strategically in endowments and preferences is considered. A notion of equilibrium, namely, strategic equilibrium is defined. It is shown that price-taking and strategic behavior leads to identical results

Domain walls in supersymmetric QCD

We consider domain walls that appear in supersymmetric SU(N) with one massive flavour. In particular, for N > 3 we explicitly construct the elementary domain wall that interpolates between two contiguous vacua. We show that these solutions are BPS saturated for any value of the mass of the matter fields. We also comment on their large N limit and their relevance for supersymmetric gluodynamics.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, uses latex with hep99 class files. Presented at the International Europhysics Conference in High Energy Physics, Tampere (Finland) 15-21 July 199

Strategic equilibrium in economies with a continuum of agents.

In this note, a pure exchange economy with a continuum of agents who behave strategically in endowments and preferences is considered. A notion of equilibrium, namely, strategic equilibrium is defined. It is shown that price-taking and strategic behavior leads to identical results.Strategic equilibrium; Pure exchange economy; Continuum economy;

Some discrete approaches to continuum economies

Given the preferences of the agents of a continuum economy, we define the average and unanimous preference. This allow us to consider several sequences of economies, in which only a finite number of different agents' characteristics can be distinguished. We obtain approximation results for the core of these economies