The Power to Harm and Heal: Intercultural Medicine in Modern Mexico, Joshua Mentanko, 2026, University of North Carolina Press
The notion of intercultural medicine is perhaps best known from China, where the “barefoot doctors” became emblematic of the Cultural Revolution.
These healthcare providers with only basic medical training who worked in rural villages undertook the treatment of common illnesses and advanced principles of hygiene and family planning.
Many were farmers, folk healers and graduates, and they drew heavily upon traditional Chinese remedies to bring solace in areas that were not served by urban healthcare systems.
However, Mexico’s pioneering role in promoting intercultural medicine began long before this, and it is high time the country was recognised for introducing the first programme of its kind and subsequently developing key principles in this field.
Joshua Mentanko traces this history in The Power to Harm and Heal, a highly original study making a valuable contribution to an area of scholarship that places Latin America at the origin of an important field.
As the author writes, “Despite having an office with the Mexican state and existing as a field of study, the official or statist interrelationship between traditional and biomedicine—intercultural medicine—has until recently only figured as an interesting side note in historiographies of development, indigenous peoples, and medicine.”
Mentanko’s history begins with the story of Pascual Hernández, a Tzotzil curandero who was a participant in Mexico’s first intercultural medicine initiative, the first such programme on the American continent.
This was launched in 1952 by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) through its first coordinating centre, the Centro Coordinador Indigenista Tzeltal-Tzotzil (CCTT) in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas.
Not surprisingly, some of Mexico’s most eminent anthropologists were behind this landmark effort to recognise the value of indigenous medicine but also build a bridge through it with modern scientific methods.
They were carrying the mission of revolutionary social justice and agrarianism promoted by President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) to every corner of the country.
Pascual Hernández is important among other things for collaborating with William Holland, author of Medicina Maya en los Altos de Chiapas (1963), a book that demonstrated the cross-fertilization of western and traditional medicine as a result of the INI’s programme.
As the author notes, over the course of the 20th century, traditional medicine has become increasingly subject to standardisation, legalisation, politicisation and other metrics of “officialisation” because it is a metric by which the state and popular actors articulate indigenous difference in relation to health.
Mentanko’s book suggests strongly the need to reevaluate an understanding of biomedicalisation—growing state activity in health—as essentially hostile to traditional medicine and its patients and practitioners.
As he shows, the fate of intercultural medicine has in essence been shaped by political factors, and in particular a desire to integrate indigenous communities into the political embrace of the state forged by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).
Mentanko writes: “Negotiations with traditional medicine practitioners and efforts to accommodate traditional medicine beliefs anchored broader and deeply rooted strategies and practices of state formation in the field of health and indigenismo, or indigenous policy.
“In Mexico, such modes of negotiation and support helped link the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) to a sufficiently broad power base, at least until its electoral defeat in the presidential elections of 2000.”
The author argues that the category of traditional medicine is, as with other traditions, a product of an effort to modernise by extending rational state practices in health.
Targeting traditional medicine and associating it with indigeneity resulted in reification, by which intercultural health, like other aspects of rural politics in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, became more oriented towards indigenous identities.
He writes: “Yet as this book demonstrates, much of the early writing on traditional medicine in the 1940s and 1950s saw the category as the product of structural economic inequalities. Traditional medicine as signifying an inalienably ‘indigenous’ set of practices and beliefs is more recent.”
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Categories: Mexico