Download or read book Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis written by Roxane Richter and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary manuscript examines one nonprofit’s five years of medical outreach in the condemned witches village of Gnani in Ghana, focusing on the clashes between traditional Ghanaian beliefs, African religious tenets, and contemporary Western medical science. The research draws upon 1,714 patient interventions and 95 personal interviews, exposing the inherent challenges of separating indigenous beliefs surrounding fate and witchcraft convictions from contemporary interpretations of biological pathogens, structural and gender-based violence, and evidence-based medicine. This book offers a novel perspective on witchcraft as it examines questions of stigmatization in order to extrapolate how disease, injury, and illness relate to social condition and the dialogue surrounding witchcraft. These unprecedented insights will serve to uncover and explore rural Ghanaian challenges in gender-based violence, religion, legal and political tenets, human rights, and medical science and their many implications for those in search of health parity, social justice, gender equity, and human rights.
Download or read book Witch Camps and Witchcraft Discourse in Africa written by Matthew Gmalifo Mabefam and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how local development interventions related to witchcraft in Africa intersect and conflict with globally accepted development practices. It argues for expansion and diversification of development practices and problematizes international development practices that can jeopardize the well-being of the people it seeks to support.
Download or read book Buruli Ulcer written by Gerd Pluschke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major objective of this open access book is to summarize the current status of Buruli Ulcer (BU) research for the first time. It will identify gaps in our knowledge, stimulate research and support control of the disease by providing insight into approaches for surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment of Buruli Ulcer. Book chapters will cover the history, epidemiology diagnosis, treatment and disease burden of BU and provide insight into the microbiology, genomics, transmission and virulence of Mycobacterium ulcerans.
Download or read book African Science written by Douglas J. Falen and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sensitive and personal investigation into Benin's occult world, Douglas J. Falen wrestles with the challenges of encountering a reality in which magic, science, and the Vodun religion converge into a single universal force. He takes seriously his Beninese interlocutors' insistence that the indigenous phenomenon known as àze ("witchcraft") is an African science, credited with fantastic and productive deeds, such as teleportation and supernatural healing. Although the Beninese understanding of àze reflects positive scientific properties in its use of specialized knowledge to harness nature's energy and realize economic success, its boundless power is inherently ambivalent because it can corrupt its users, who dispense death and destruction. Witches and healers are equivalent to supervillains and superheroes, locked in epic battles over malevolent and benevolent human desires. Beninese people's discourse about such mystical confrontations expresses a philosophy of moral duality and cosmic balance. Falen demonstrates how a deep engagement with another lived reality opens our minds and contributes to understanding across cultural difference.
Download or read book Family Upheaval written by Mikkel Rytter and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pakistani migrant families in Denmark find themselves in a specific ethno-national, post-9/11 environment where Muslim immigrants are subjected to processes of non-recognition, exclusion and securitization. This ethnographic study explores how, why, and at what costs notions of relatedness, identity, and belonging are being renegotiated within local families and transnational kinship networks. Each entry point concerns the destructive–productive constitution of family life, where neglected responsibilities, obligations, and trust lead not only to broken relationships, but also, and inevitably, to the innovative creation of new ones. By connecting the micro-politics of the migrant family with the macro-politics of the nation state and global conjunctures in general, the book argues that securitization and suspicion—launched in the name of “integration”—escalate internal community dynamics and processes of family upheaval in unpredicted ways.
Download or read book The New Testament in Its Ritual World written by Richard DeMaris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-03-03 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers new and insightful perspectives on early Christian communities and their cultural environment, through exploration of rituals central to Greco-Roman life.
Download or read book Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic written by Jesper Sørensen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic ten leading scholars of religion provide up-to-date investigations into these classic domains from historical, anthropological, cognitive, philosophical and theoretical perspectives.
Download or read book Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania written by Gábor Klaniczay and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a selection of studies on witchcraft and demonology by those involved in an interdisciplinary research group begun in Hungary thirty years ago. They examine urban and rural witchcraft conflicts from early modern times to the present, from a region hitherto rarely taken into consideration in witchcraft research. Special attention is given to healers, midwives, and cunning folk, including archaic sorcerer figures such as the táltos; whose ambivalent role is analysed in social, legal, medical and religious contexts. This volume examines how waves of persecution emerged and declined, and how witchcraft was decriminalised. Fascinating case-studies on vindictive witch-hunters, quarrelling neighbours, rivalling midwives, cunning shepherds, weather magician impostors, and exorcist Franciscan friars provide a colourful picture of Hungarian and Transylvanian folk beliefs and mythologies, as well as insights into historical and contemporary issues.
Download or read book Deadly Words written by Jeanne Favret-Saada and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1980-12-04 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1980 book examines witchcraft beliefs and experiences in the Bocage, a rural area of western France. It also introduced a powerful theoretical attitude towards the progress of the ethnographer's enquiries, suggesting that a full knowledge of witchcraft involves being 'caught up' in it oneself. In the Bocage, being bewitched is to be 'caught' in a sequence of misfortunes. According to those who are bewitched, the culprit is someone in the neighbourhood: the witch, who can cast a spell with a word, a touch or a look, and whose 'power' comes from a book of spells inherited from an ancestor. Only a professional magician, an 'unwitcher', has any chance of breaking the succession of misfortunes which befall those who have been bewitched. He undertakes a battle of magic with the suspected witch, a battle which is eventually fatal.
Download or read book Social Issues in Diagnosis written by Annemarie Jutel and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the social process of diagnosis is critical to improving doctor-patient relationships and health outcomes. Diagnosis, the classification tool of medicine, serves an important social role. It confers social status on those who diagnose, and it impacts the social status of those diagnosed. Studying diagnosis from a sociological perspective offers clinicians and students a rich and sometimes provocative view of medicine and the cultures in which it is practiced. Social Issues in Diagnosis describes how diagnostic labels and the process of diagnosis are anchored in groups and structures as much as they are in the interactions between patient and doctor. The sociological perspective is informative, detailed, and different from what medical, nursing, social work, and psychology students—and other professionals who diagnose or work with diagnoses—learn in a pathophysiology or clinical assessment course. It is precisely this difference that should be integral to student and clinician education, enriching the professional experience with improved doctor-patient relationships and potentially better health outcomes. Chapters are written by both researchers and educators and reviewed by medical advisors. Just as medicine divides disease into diagnostic categories, so have the editors classified the social aspects of diagnosis into discrete areas of reflection, including • Classification of illness • Process of diagnosis • Phenomenon of uncertainty • Diagnostic labels • Discrimination • Challenges to medical authority • Medicalization • Technological influences • Self-diagnosis Additional chapters by clinicians, including New York Times columnist Lisa Sanders, M.D., provide a view from the front line of diagnosis to round out the discussion. Sociology and pre-med students, especially those prepping for the new MCAT section on social and behavioral sciences, will appreciate the discussion questions, glossary of key terms, and CLASSIFY mnemonic.
Download or read book Encounters with Witchcraft written by Norman N. Miller and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encounters with Witchcraft is a personal story of a young man's fascination with African witchcraft discovered first in a trek across East Africa and the Congo. The story unfolds over four decades during the author's long residence in and many trips to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. As a field researcher he learns from villagers what it is like to live with witches, and how witches are seen through African eyes. His teachers are healers, cult leaders, witch-hunters and self-proclaimed "witches" as well as policemen, politicians and judges. A key figure is Mohammadi Lupanda, a frail village woman whose only child has died years before. In her dreams, however, she believes the little girl is not dead, but only lost in the fields. Mohammadi is discovered wandering at night, wailing and calling out for the child. Her neighbors are terror-stricken and she is quickly brought to a village trial and banished as a witch. The author is able to watch and listen to the proceedings and later investigate the deeper story. He discovers mysteries about Mohammadi that are only solved when he returns to the village three decades later. Today, witch-hunting and witchcraft-related crimes are found in more than seventy developing countries. Epidemics of violence against alleged witches, mainly women, but including elders of both genders, and even children is on the increase in some parts of the world. Witchcraft beliefs may lie behind vigilante murders, political assassinations, revenge killings and commercial murders for human body parts. Through African voices the author addresses key questions. Do witchcraft powers exist? Why does witchcraft persist? What are its historic roots? Why is witchcraft-based violence so often found within families? Does witchcraft serve as a hidden legal and political system, a mafia-like under-government? The author holds up a mirror for us to think about religious beliefs in our own experience that rely heavily on myth and superstition.
Download or read book Disguised as the Devil written by M. M. Drymon and published by Wythe Avenue Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work began as a history of Lyme disease. Looking in the historical records for places where this disease in now endemic, the author noted that witch afflicitions kept appearing in these same spots. What unfolds is a journey of discovery, looking back, into the forested and deforested landscapes of Europe America's past that were abound with acorns, deer, pigs, along with human societies creating cultural practices that had environmental ramifications. Drawing upon the latest in scientific and historical research, this study will become essential reading for those interested in controversies surrounding this "disease in disguise." It also explores the etiology of the witch and tells a compelling tale about the timeless importance of the interaction between humanity and the "invisible world" of bacteria. -- Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa written by Isak Arnold Niehaus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography casts new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between politics, witchcraft and AIDS in South Africa.
Download or read book Putting a Name to It written by Annemarie Jutel and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, British Sociological Association Over a decade after medical sociologist Phil Brown called for a sociology of diagnosis, Putting a Name to It provides the first book-length, comprehensive framework for this emerging subdiscipline of medical sociology. Diagnosis is central to medicine. It creates social order, explains illness, identifies treatments, and predicts outcomes. Using concepts of medical sociology, Annemarie Goldstein Jutel sheds light on current knowledge about the components of diagnosis to outline how a sociology of diagnosis would function. She situates it within the broader discipline, lays out the directions it should explore, and discusses how the classification of illness and framing of diagnosis relate to social status and order. Jutel explains why this matters not just to doctor-patient relationships but also to the entire medical system. As a result, she argues, the sociological realm of diagnosis encompasses not only the ongoing controversy surrounding revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in psychiatry but also hot-button issues such as genetic screening and pharmaceutical industry disease mongering. Both a challenge and a call to arms, Putting a Name to It is a lucid, persuasive argument for formalizing, professionalizing, and advancing longstanding practice. Jutel’s innovative, open approach and engaging arguments will find support among medical sociologists and practitioners and across much of the medical system.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Witchcraft 4 volumes written by Richard M. Golden Director, Jewish Studies Program and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-01-30 with total page 1310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive compilation on witchcraft and witch hunting in the early modern era exploring significant people, places, beliefs, and events. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition is the definitive reference on the age of witch hunting (approximately 1430–1750), its origins, expansion, and ultimate decline. Incorporating a wealth of recent scholarship in four richly illustrated, alphabetically organized volumes, it offers historians and general readers alike the opportunity to explore the realities behind the legends of witchcraft and witchcraft trials. Over 170 contributors from 28 nations provide vivid, documented descriptions and analyses of witchcraft trials and locations, folklore and beliefs, magical practices and deities, influential texts, and the full range of players in this extraordinary drama—witchcraft theorists and theologians; historians and authors; judges, clergy, and rulers; the accused; and their persecutors. Concentrating on Europe and the Americas in the early modern era, the work also covers relevant topics from the ancient Near East (including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles), classical antiquity, and the European Middle Ages.
Download or read book Witchcraft Sorcery and Social Categories Among the Safwa written by Alan Harwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970, this book explores the role of concepts of disease in the social life of the Safwa of Tanzania, particularly through beliefs concerning witchcraft and sorcery. Examining Safwa ideas about the cuasation of disease and death and the use of aetiological terms in actual cases, it demonstrates a parallel between these ideas and terms, on the one hand and the Safwa system of social categories on the other. A descrption of the Safwa environment, way of life and social system is followed by an account of the concepts of death and disease and of their causes as revealed in ancestor rites, divination and autopsy. An analysis of case histories demonstrates that the cause assigned to a particular instance of illness or death depends upon the status relationship between discputing parties who are associated with the patient. The way in which the parallel between aetiological and social categoeis helps to control the outcome of disputes is also examined.
Download or read book An Issue of Relevance written by Grant LeMarquand and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the center of the Christian world has migrated south, especially into Sub-Saharan Africa, a growing and dynamic African biblical scholarship has emerged. Prominent among the texts that have grabbed the interest of African biblical scholars is the gospel story of «the woman with the flow of blood» (Mark 5:25-34; Matthew 9:20-22; Luke 8:43-48). This book compares traditional North Atlantic scholarship on this gospel story with the new insights of African biblical studies in order to test the contention that these two versions of biblical scholarship are substantially different. In particular, this book argues that scholarships in the North Atlantic and African worlds differ in their conceptions of the goal of exegesis. For African scholars practical hermeneutical concerns are considered central to the exegetical task.
