Home, Where Healing is Complete: An Ethnography of Igbo Migrants in Germany and their Biomedical and Traditional Healing Experience

Abstract

When doctors in Germany are confronted with treating disease and sickness that migrants and refugees from diverse regional, socio-cultural, and religious backgrounds manifest, they do so finally, and if possible, within the framework of conventional assessment and along a hermeneutics of medical outlook while replacing them with Western biomedical concepts. But when cultural misunderstandings between the doctor and patients become so great, migrants transit to traditional healers and, if necessary, embark on an expensive and arduous journey back to their home country to gain access to healing rituals and reconnection with local spiritual and cosmological forces, all in the hope of achieving physical and emotional well-being. Given the above, I conducted an in-depth ethnographic study of Igbo migrants in Germany and Nigeria’s Igbo region. Classical ethnological research methods, including participatory observation and semi-structured individual and group interviews, were used, enriched by old and current studies on Igbo and other African societies and cross-regional research literature from migration, medical transnationalism, health, dream, witchcraft, psychiatry, and ethnology/sociology. It inculcated the case histories as representing the overarching context of the Igbo ontology and the development of the concepts of illness and healing against the background of traditional ideas and values of cosmology. The focus on the relationship between humans and the environment and the role of the community provides valuable and compelling analysis and discussion about why Igbo immigrants still resort to local healing practices.