A Global History of Medicine
A Global History of Medicine

Author: Mark Jackson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-05

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0192524690

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In recent decades, there has been considerable interest in writing histories of medicine that capture local, regional, and global dimensions of health and health care in the same frame. Exploring changing patterns of disease and different systems of medicine across continents and countries, A Global History of Medicine provides a rich introduction to this emergent field. The introductory chapter addresses the challenges of writing the history of medicine across space and time and suggests ways in which tracing the entangled histories of the patchworks of practice that have constituted medicine allow us to understand how healing traditions are always plural, permeable, and shaped by power and privilege. Written by scholars from around the world and accompanied by suggestions for further reading, individual chapters explore historical developments in health, medicine, and disease in China, the Islamic World, North and Latin America, Africa, South-east Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. The final chapter focuses on smallpox eradication and reflects on the sources and methods necessary to integrate local and global dimensions of medicine more effectively. Collectively, the contributions to A Global History of Medicine will not only be invaluable to undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking to expand their knowledge of health and medicine across time, but will also provide a constructive theoretical and empirical platform for future scholarship.

Living Folk Religions
Living Folk Religions

Author: Sravana Borkataky-Varma

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-30

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1000878627

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Living Folk Religions presents cutting-edge contributions from a range of disciplines to examine religious folkways across cultures. This collection embraces the non-elite and non-sanctioned, the oral, fluid, accessible, evolving religions of people (volk) on the ground. Split into five sections, this book covers: What Is Folk Religion? Spirit Beings and Deities Performance and Ritual Praxis Possession and Exorcism Health, Healing, and Lifestyle Topics include demons and ambivalent gods, tree and nature spirits, revolutionary renunciates, oral lore, possession and exorcism, divination, midwestern American spiritualism, festivals, queer sexuality among ritual specialists, the dead returned, vernacular religions, diaspora adaptations, esoteric influences underlying public cultures, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), music and sound experiences, death rituals, and body and wellness cultures. Living Folk Religions is a must-read for those studying Comparative Religions, World Religions, and Religious Studies, and it will also interest specialists and general readers, particularly enthusiastic readers of Anthropology, Folklore and Folk Studies, Global Studies, and Sociology.

Former Guerrillas in Mozambique
Former Guerrillas in Mozambique

Author: Nikkie Wiegink

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-03-06

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0812296907

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A sensitive ethnography of former Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) combatants After sixteen years of civil war (1976—1992) between the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) and the government of Mozambique, over 90,000 former combatants were disarmed and demobilized by a United Nations-led program. Former combatants were to find their ways as civilians again, assisted by community-based reintegration rituals. While the process was often presented as a success story of peace, renewed armed conflict involving RENAMO combatants in 2013 and onward suggests that the reintegration of former guerrillas was a far more complex story. In Former Guerrillas in Mozambique, Nikkie Wiegink describes the trajectories of former RENAMO combatants in Maringue, a rural district in central Mozambique. Rather than focus on violence, trauma, and the reacceptance of these ex-combatants by the community, Wiegink emphasizes the ways in which RENAMO veterans have navigated unstable and sometimes dangerous social and political environments during and after the war. She examines the experiences of both male and female war veterans and their attempts at securing a tolerable life. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork conducted long after the war ended, Former Guerrillas in Mozambique offers a critique of a notion of reintegration that assumes that the lives of former combatants are shaped first by a break with society when joining the armed group and later by a break with the past when demobilizing and a return to a status quo. Wiegink argues, instead, that former combatants' motivations, experiences, and interactions are not necessarily characterized by a rigid separation from their RENAMO past, but rather comprise a mixture of ruptures and continuities of relationships and networks, including families, the spiritual world, fellow former combatants, political parties, and the state.

Strength beyond Structure
Strength beyond Structure

Author: Mirjam de Bruijn

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-07-31

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 9047421035

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This book explores the notion of agency in a range of empirical situations in Africa. Agency directs our quest for an understanding of the dynamics and social transformations of African situations to the domains of creativity, inventiveness and reflexivity. It emphasizes the possibilities individuals and social groups perceive when faced with the constraints that tend to mark African social life. The case studies provide an alternative view of people and society in Africa by looking at the ways social strength is created in the hope of overcoming many of the structural limitations encountered in daily life. 'Strength beyond Structure' challenges the optimism that is engrained in the development rhetoric about Africa by making agency the subject of empirical scrutiny.

Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000
Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000

Author: Waltraud Ernst

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1134736010

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Research into 'colonial' or 'imperial' medicine has made considerable progress in recent years, whilst the study of what is usually referred to as 'indigenous' or 'folk' medicine in colonized societies has received much less attention. This book redresses the balance by bringing together current critical research into medical pluralism during the last two centuries. It includes a rich selection of historical, anthropological and sociological case-studies that cover many different parts of the globe, ranging from New Zealand to Africa, China, South Asia, Europe and the USA.

The Anthropology of Christianity
The Anthropology of Christianity

Author: Fenella Cannell

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-11-07

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0822388154

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This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse

Introducing Medical Anthropology
Introducing Medical Anthropology

Author: Merrill Singer

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2011-11-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0759120900

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This revised textbook provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical anthropology. The narrative is guided by unifying themes. First, medical anthropology is actively engaged in helping to address pressing health problems around the globe through research, intervention, and policy-related initiatives. Second, illness and disease cannot be fully understood or effectively addressed by treating them solely as biological in nature; rather, health problems involve complex biosocial processes and resolving them requires attention to range of factors including systems of belief, structures of social relationship, and environmental conditions. Third, through an examination of health inequalities on the one hand and environmental degradation and environment-related illness on the other, the book underlines the need for going beyond cultural or even ecological models of health toward a comprehensive medical anthropology. The authors show that a medical anthropology that integrates biological, cultural, and social factors to truly understand the origin of ill health will contribute to more effective and equitable health care systems.

Working with Spirit
Working with Spirit

Author: Jo Thobeka Wreford

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2008-05-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0857450158

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In the current model of health dispensation in South Africa there are two major paradigms, the spirit-inspired tradition of izangoma sinyanga and biomedicine. These operate at best in parallel, but more often than not are at odds with one another. This book, based on the author’s personal experience as a practitioner of traditional African medicine, considers the effects of the absence of spirit in biomedicine on collaborative relationships. Given the unprecedented challenge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, the author suggests that more cooperation is vital. Taking a critical look at the role of anthropology in this endeavor, she proposes the development of a “language of spirit” by means of which the spirit-inspired aetiology of izangoma sinyanga may be made comprehensible to academic scientists and applicable to medical interventions. The author discusses white izangoma in the context of current debates on healing and hybridity and insists that there exists a powerful role for izangoma in the realm of societal healing. Above all, the book constitutes a start in what the author hopes will develop into an ongoing intellectual conversation between traditional African healing, academe, and biomedicine in South Africa.

Taarab Music in Zanzibar in the Twentieth Century
Taarab Music in Zanzibar in the Twentieth Century

Author: Janet Topp Fargion

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317047087

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The musical genre of taarab is played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast in East Africa. Taarab contains all the features of a typical 'Indian Ocean' music, combining influences from Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, India and the West with local musical practices. In Taarab, Music in Zanzibar, Janet Topp Fargion traces the development of the genre in Zanzibar, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Of special interest is the role of women. Although men play the main role in the composition and performance of the genre, Topp Fargion argues that the modernization of the genre owes a debt to the participation of women - as audiences and primary consumers, but also as poets and innovators of musical concepts. The book weaves together the historical, social, economic, religious and political dynamics involved in the development of the genre, and investigates how these are played out in the performance of taarab music on Zanzibar.

Religion in Philanthropic Organizations
Religion in Philanthropic Organizations

Author: Thomas J. Davis

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-09-26

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0253009979

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Religion in Philanthropic Organizations explores the tensions inherent in religious philanthropies across a variety of organizations and examines the effect assumptions about "professional" philanthropy have had on how religious philanthropies carry out their activities. Among the organizations discussed are the Salvation Army, the World Council of Churches, and Catholic Charities USA. The essays focus on the work of one individual, Robert Pierce, founder of World Vision and Samaritan's Purse, and on more general matters such as philanthropy and Jewish identity, American Muslim philanthropy since 9/11, and the federal program that funds faith-based initiatives. The book sheds light on how religion and philanthropy function in American society, shaping and being shaped by the culture and its notions of the "common good."