Category Archives: Folk medicine

Ancestral Spirits of Guam – Chamorro taotaomo’na

Text/Context

DA – In the Chamorro culture in Guam, there are the spirits of the Chamorro ancestors. You ask for permission so you don’t disturb the spirits, called the taotaomo’na.
Interviewer – For entering the forest?
DA – Yeah. The taotaomo’na live in the forest and also protect it.
(DA shows me a picture of a stone structure. It is made of two massive stone shape: one is a wide column, and on top is a round bulge with a flat side facing upwards. There are two people in the background to show how massive this structure is)
DA – If you see these structures in the forest, you should leave immediately. These are the latte stones and it’s a marker that it’s an ancient Chamorro site. They were just used as pillars or support for ancient Chamorro homes and stuff like that.
Interviewer – What is the significance of Chamorro sites and what would happen?
DA – I guess you can kinda treat them as tombs. There’s probably very likely ancient spirits in there that you shouldn’t disturb out of respect, and if you do, you would be cursed and get some sort of illness or physical pain.
Interviewer – Are ancestors and spirits generally a big part of Chamorro culture?
DA – Yeah! Respecting your elders is one of the important things you have to learn in the culture, so that also plays a part in it.
Interviewer – And is there anything you can do to lift the curses of the Chamorro?
DA – Yeah! Witch doctors (in the Philippines: albularyo, in guam: suruhanu). First they see what’s causing whatever you’re feeling. Usually with melted candle wax and a bowl of water: they let it drip and the hardened wax would form into who caused it. And they tell you what to do based on that. But I don’t really know much about this part.•
DA – I read up on it to refresh my memory, but it makes sense why they wouldn’t be kind to visitors. Spain, Japan, and the US fucked up the culture pretty bad. (By the 18th and 19th centuries, travelers were likely to see latte stones in areas abandoned after foreign diseases wiped out a lot of the Chamorro population)
DA – It’s a good thing a big part still survived, but barely anyone speaks the language. It’s part of the required courses in the education system. My Chamorro teacher and I talked about this before. The problem is not many people are really interested in continuing to learn beyond the requirements. You only need to take one year of Chamorro language in high school, and most students take it freshman year. And like everyone tends to do, they forget most of it by the time they graduate. And there aren’t many speakers in the first place either.

Analysis

The taotaomo’na spirits were the ancestors of the Chamorro people, native to Guam. It is important to be respectful not only to living ancestors, but also to those who passed on a long time ago. Signs of their presence, like the latte stones, are common in places where many of the Chamorro had been killed of from foreign plague, and also act as tombs. It is common knowledge in Guam not to risk drawing bad things or curses to yourself by disrespecting the dead. The informant recalls that these stones are some of the best preserved remnants of the Chamorro culture, because so much of it died out due to foreign plague, assimilation into western cultures, including the language. Although the informant learned more of the Chamorro language than most in their high school, the informant regrets that they have also forgotten much of what they learned.

Cure for Hangovers

Context: M.Z. learned about this cure from his mother while growing up in the American Southwest.

M.Z. : Okay, so the first one would be my mother’s cure for hangovers she swore that the best thing for a hangover was to get a Coca-Cola from a soda fountain, it could not be in a can or a bottle Add to be out of a soda machine and that was the only thing along with Saltine crackers that would settle your stomach and help you cure a hangover.
P.Z. : Just drinking and eating those two things? Nothing else?
M.Z. : Yep, yep those were the two key ingredients. You could eat other stuff but that was you had to have the soda fountain Coca-Cola.

Thoughts: I’ve heard of a variety of hangover cures, and it seems that it is traditionally some sort of food or drink concoction. This meant that I wasn’t surprised by this cure, although I had never heard of this one specifically.

Cure for Hiccups

Context: M.Z. learned about this cure while growing up with his family in the American Southwest.

M.Z. : And the cure that I was taught when I was little for hiccups um which I don’t remember exactly where this came from but it was through the family was that you would put a pencil in between your teeth. You would get a full glass of water. You would then try and drink the glass of water from the back side of the glass so you basically had to turn your head almost upside down and drink the water bending over with the pencil in between your teeth.
P.Z. : From the backside of the glass… So you’re folded forwards…
M.Z. : Yes.
P.Z. : Tilting the glass up to drink out of it —
M.Z. : No, tilting the glass —
P.Z. : Oh, down?
M.Z. : Well, the, the bottom of the glass goes towards your chest because you’re leaning forward. So you had to drink it that way. And I think the key was, if you didn’t drown, you somehow were so distracted your hiccups went away.

Thoughts: Overall, this was one of the most intensive hiccup cures I’ve heard, but supposedly it has proved relatively effective. I thought that this was an extremely interesting cure, and it was one I had never come across before.

Lumi Lumi/ Tui Na Massage

Informant Information 
Nationality: Filipino American 
Occupation: Teacher 
Residence: California
Date of Performance/Collection: Apr 23, 2022
Primary Language: English 

Background
My informant is my mentor who is Filipino and Hawaiian and during one of our phone conversations, we talked about Filipino folk medicine/massages.

Performance
S- We do a type of massage and it uses taping these two thin sticks, two tan sticks you held open the pores of the body so you tap it on to the skin of the body and so the person lays on their stomach with their back exposed and you would think someone’s whipping them with the sticks but what it’s actually doing is helping get the toxins to come to the surface like beating. There’s– there’s a guava oil that’s rubbed down your back in your legs and your back your neck and you lay out in the sun until it starts to open your pores, and then they tap you as if you’re playing a drum, up and down your back real thin sticks so it isn’t– it isn’t hitting hard, it’s more of a whipping the skin to bring the toxins to the surface other than fatty tissues and then all that guava that is put on you turns black, then you— then you go into a stream or river and wash it off but all that all the toxins in the body are brought up in the guava is the stabilizer in holds the toxins.

Thoughts
This massage reminds me of an ionic foot massage where a person places their feet in a footbath filled with water and a probe is placed in the water that draws out the toxins. After a little more research, I learned this massage is also done to treat children with stomach problems and soothe pregnant women. 

Spy, Pencil-circleSummer, et al. “What Is Lomi Lomi Massage?” What Is Lomi Lomi Massage? | Lomi Lomi | Good Spa Guide, 6 May 2016, https://goodspaguide.co.uk/features/lomi-lomi-massage.

Coins for Styes

Description (From Transcript): “I don’t know if you know what styes are but like they’re an eye infection sometimes, and what they would tell us to do, or what my grandpa would tell us to do is to get either like a cold penny, or a cold spoon that you would put on the ground first (which I don’t know why). And then you would put that on your eye, and it would somehow help it go away. He (my grandpa) would leave it (The penny or spoon) outside and then put it on the stye to heal it. There were other things they (my grandparents) did. If they had like cuts, or like burns, they would wrap it in like banana leaves, or things like that, so they (the rituals) never had specific names. It was just kind of known things they would do and then they were passed on. And I actually was just talking to one of my friends, who’s Korean American, and she was talking about how they have similar things that they would do. But they would pull out an eyelash for styes as well.They would pull out the eyelash that’s near it (the stye) and then they put the eyelash on the ground. So it’s always having to do with something outside, I feel like which is interesting. Because, especially in Ecuador, for my grandparents growing up, they were very connected to the land and farming and things like that. I feel like, for them, it (spoons and coins) was just like things that were accessible to them. Maybe just like single household objects, because they didn’t necessarily…I know my grandparents growing up didn’t necessarily have the means to have the most medical things, if that makes sense”.

Context: T.M. is a student at USC. She is part Ecuadorian and part Native Alaskan. She explains that her grandparents are originally from Ecuador, and this was a medical tradition their parents taught them. Her grandpa then taught it to her mom, and her mom would tell her about it, even though has never personally done it. Even though she has never personally done it, she does believe that it works because her mom told her that it worked for her. She remembers it from early childhood because she always had a problem with styes. Her parents would take her to a doctor and she would get medicine. But when she would tell her grandparents about it, she got to hear their history and what they would do. Since then, it has always stayed with her. 
My interpretation: I thought the use of a metal object was important because metal can become cold easily, especially if it’s placed outside when the weather is cold. The fact that it has to be cold is also important because the cold (like ice packs that get placed in freezers and are used when a child gets injured) is known to lower swelling, which can sometimes happen with styes. The overlap with the informant’s friend over aspects of the outside world is also very telling about how medical treatments are connected to the resources people have in the geographical environment they are in. In this case, the informant’s grandparents being from Ecuador, a developing country with a rich ecosystem, reveals why they used affordable items and made sure to physically place them on the land.