Marti Kheel's essay contrasting herbal healing with
Western medicine provoked one of our most heated discussions.
Some women took issue with Kheel for "putting herb lore
on a pedestal," feeling that she was remiss not to
mention that herbs, too, can be "deadly."
Her
approach, one woman said, is a form of "starry-eyed
romanticism" that disregards nature's destructive side,
such as earthquakes, cataclysms . . . and potentially lethal
plants. The woman found Kheel lacking a sound scientific
grasp of botany.
Another woman countered that this sort of
accusation parallels those hurled at studies on
prepatriarchal goddess cultures: bad scholarship, poor
documentation, no legitimate historicity, etc. Herbal
traditionprimarily oral and the realm of
womenwill always be considered flawed in a society
where rationalist, techno thinking dominates and alternative
approaches are debased.
Several women emphasized that as a philosopher Kheel's
focus has less to do with herbs versus pharmaceuticals per se
than in exposing the Western medical attitude of the body as
a battlefield. Holistic health, on the other hand, is
thousands of centuries old and works with the body as
an ally for attaining self-balance. One woman felt that we
"need to combine the best of both traditions."
Most
women vehemently questioned whether this was even possible.
One woman passionately declared that the allopathic world
view and the homeopathic world view are "mutually
exclusive." The American Medical Association (AMA)
"successes" are nothing less than wars on the minds
and bodies of women.
Prepared with statistics, another woman
pointed out that five out of every ten major operations in
this country are performed on women's reproductive organs,
and that fifty percent of all U.S. women have had either
their ovaries or their wombs removed by the time they are
sixty.
Given the paucity of discourse devoted to alternative
viewpoints, some women were indignant at the suggestion that
the merits of AMA-identified medicine should be accorded our
energy. One woman informed us of an ominous case-in-point
concerning the medical establishment's proactive efforts to
obliterate the alternative healing profession and expropriate
the burgeoning natural health market for itself.
The
Congressional Health and Environmental Subcommittee, she
explained, is currently studying Bill HR2597, legislation
designed to make over-the-counter nutrients fall under the
regulation of the FDA. All herbs, vitamins, etc. would be
available only from AMA-licensed physicians, akin to
prescription drugs. And yet, ninety percent of all medical
schools do not even offer classes in nutrition!
A primary tenant of ecofeminism is the premise that the
domination of women and the domination of nature are
fundamentally connected. Proceeding on this continuum from
the plant world to the animal world, Sally Abbott's essay
probed the relationship between human animals and nonhuman
animals. She writes:
"Shamanic tribal religion had its origins in
hunting magic at the onset of the Ice Age, close to
40,000 years ago. Scenes on the walls of caves in Europe
depict the slaying of "souls" of animals
through art to be followed by capturing their body in the
hunt.
After the hunt, the slain animals' bones were
ritually buried to appease their souls....Thus, I believe
occurred the first separation of body and soul...[and
that] ritual and religion might have been brought to
birth by the necessity of propitiation for the killing of
animals."
One woman felt that if Abbott's theory has validity, then
perhaps the archetypical patriarchal practice of objectifying
other beings was formulated (however innocently) in men's
early hunting rituals. Another woman proposed that women's
ancient rituals were primarily centered on bonding with
nature (ex., connecting our menstrual cycles to the moon's
rhythms), as opposed to honing separations between body and
soul.
The first woman added that an examination of the roots
of nonhuman animals as potentially the first oppressed
"other" may perhaps shed light on the
dominant-subordinant duality paradigm intrinsic to
contemporary patriarchal culture. Overall women were
extremely interested in exploring whether this transition in
thought actually occurred, and if so, how exactly did it
evolve.
Women also discussed the massive violence human animals
inflict daily on nonhuman animals: raising and eating
factory-farmed animals, zoos, laboratory experiments, rodeos,
the fur industry, etc. Such barbarities have spawned even
greater psychic pain, angst, and need for propitiation than
the dilemma faced by early shamanic tribesespecially
since most of the industrialized world is bereft of a
nature-based spirituality or rituals to expiate speciesist
behavior.
Our session ended with one woman informing us that chayot
is the Hebrew word for animals. Tellingly, chayot is a
feminine-gendered noun.
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