Cosmos, Gods and Madmen

Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78533-177-0
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, 220 Seiten, HC gerader Rücken kaschiert, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 481 g

The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the human constitution, its ills and its healing and, in particular, ways which determine and limit our very possibilities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Littlewood, Roland

Lynch, Rebecca

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnomedizin
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Religionsethnologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Divinity, Disease, Distress

Roland Littlewood and Rebecca Lynch

Chapter 1. Why Animism Matters

David Napier

Chapter 2. Spreading the Gospel of the Miracle Cure: Panama’s Black Christ

Rodney J. Reynolds

Chapter 3. Madness and Miracles: Hoping for Healing in Rural Ghana

Ursula M. Read

Chapter 4. ‘Sakawa’ Rumours: Occult Internet Fraud and Ghanaian Identity

Alice Armstrong

Chapter 5. To Heal the Body is to Heal Oneself: The Body as Congregation

Isabelle Lange

Chapter 6. Addiction and the Duality of the Self in a North American Religio-Therapeutic Community

Ellie Reynolds

Chapter 7. Religious Conversion and Madness: Contested Territory in the Peruvian Andes

David M.R. Orr

Chapter 8. Cosmologies of Fear: The Medicalisation of Anxiety in Contemporary Britain

Rebecca Lynch

Chapter 9. Functionalists and Zombis: Sorcery as Spandrel and Social Rescue

Roland Littlewood

Chapter 10. Religion and Psychosis: A Common Evolutionary Trajectory?

Simon Dein

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Littlewood, Roland
Roland Littlewood is Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at UCL. He is a former president of the RAI and has undertaken fieldwork in Trinidad, Haiti, Lebanon, Italy and Albania, and has published eight books and around 200 papers.

Lynch, Rebecca
Rebecca Lynch is an Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). She has conducted fieldwork in Trinidad and the UK. Taking an approach that crosses the intersection between religion and medicine, she has published on socio-cultural, moral, and scientific constructions of the body, health and illness, and on bodily interaction with the non-human through technology, protocols, bodily fluids, and spirit agents.

Roland Littlewood is Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at UCL. He is a former president of the RAI and has undertaken fieldwork in Trinidad, Haiti, Lebanon, Italy and Albania, and has published eight books and around 200 papers.