Abstract

Palpable associations can be established between language, environmental features, and community socio-cultural profiles that show mutual influences between language, environment, health beliefs, and health-seeking behaviour. Illness terms, descriptions and local diagnoses provide clues not only to perceptions but also to preventive and therapeutic practices. The importance of indigenous knowledge cannot be gainsaid, hence the call for its incorporation into the SDGs. This paper explores Kasena illnesses domains pertaining to lexemes and phrases about illnesses as clues and perceptions of causation, symptomatology, and implied treatment options in rural society that are still upheld in some twenty-first-century communities. Techniques used in the study included a free listing of names of illness followed by in-depth interviews on illness causation and treatment. The study reveals the continued relevance of indigenous and traditional knowledge shared by local youth, thmiddle-aged and by the elderly. While plant and vegetable species are central to indigenous Kasena approaches to healing and therapy, a surprisingly large number of Kasena illness terms encoding references to fauna suggests a high significance of fauna in illness diagnosis, causal theories, and therapeutic interventions.