Rethinking medicalization through the lens of cultural hegemony: traditional healing and societal wellbeing of Chakma ethnic community in Bangladesh

The Chakma community is the largest ethnic minority group of Bangladesh primarily living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) region of the country. CHT is one of the most vulnerable regions according to almost all major development indica-tors. The Chakma community has well-established cultural heritage and traditional healing practices. Treatment seeking behaviour of Chakma community was investigated using an ethnographic approach based on key informant interviews and focus group discussions. Unlike previous studies findings from this study argues that due to the recent trend of medicaliza-tion traditional healing practices have decreased sharply in recent years. According to all study participants, biomedicine has become dominant to such an extent that it is often considered to be the only credible treatment option, especially to people who can afford relatively high expense of biomedical treatment and live near towns and cities. It has created an im-pact on the sociocultural landscape of the Chakma community as prestige previously enjoyed by the traditional healers is being jeopardized because of the growing authority and influence of biomedical practitioners. It is argued that this trend of medicalization may create a negative impact on the societal wellbeing of the group by moving the focus from healing (a holistic concept towards the improvement of the ailing body and the societal well-being of the ill person) to cure (a com-paratively narrow concept that entails the expulsion of disease from the body). Increasing medicalization needs to be criti-cally understood through the lens of cultural hegemony as a threat to Chakma ethnic identity and cultural heritage given the group’s historical and contemporary minority status. Based on the discussion presented in this paper a list of directions has been outlined relating to future research and policy formulation.