Title: Ngoma: discourses of healing in central and southern Africa 
Author: Janzen, John M
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Medical  Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Ngoma , in Bantu, means drum, song, performance, and healing cult or association. A widespread form of ritual healing in Central and Southern Africa, ngoma is fully investigated here for the first time and interpreted in a contemporary context. John Janzen's daring study incorporates drumming and spirit possession into a broader, institutional profile that emphasizes the varieties of knowledge and social forms and also the common elements of "doing ngoma ."Drawing on his recent field research in Kinshasa, Dar-es-Salaam, Mbabane, and Capetown, Janzen reveals how ngoma transcends national and social boundaries. Spoken and sung discourses about affliction, extended counseling, reorientation of the self or household, and the creation of networks that link the afflicted, their kin, and their healers are all central to ngoma - and familiar to Western self-help institutions as well. Students of African healing and also those interested in the comparative and historical study of medicine, religion, and music will find Ngoma a valuable and thought-provoking book.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: No aging in India: Alzheimer's, the bad family, and other modern things 
Author: Cohen, Lawrence 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology | Aging | South Asia
Publisher's Description: From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a detailed investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world. This compelling exploration of senility - encompassing not only the aging body but also larger cultural anxieties - combines insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Bridging literary genres as well as geographic spaces, Cohen responds to what he sees as the impoverishment of both North American and Indian gerontologies - the one mired in ambivalence toward demented old bodies, the other insistent on a dubious morality tale of modern families breaking up and abandoning their elderly. He shifts our attention irresistibly toward how old age comes to matter in the constitution of societies and their narratives of identity and history.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Old, alone, and neglected: care of the aged in the United States and Scotland 
Author: Kayser-Jones, Jeanie Schmit
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Aging | Medical  Anthropology | Medicine
Publisher's Description: As the median age of the population increases, the care and housing of the elderly in the U.S. are of increasing concern. Jeanie Kayser-Jones compares a typical private institution in the U.S. with a government-owned home in Scotland.Her analysis compels attention to the systematic abuse of the inst . . . [more]
Similar Items

Title: Paths to Asian medical knowledge
Author: Leslie, Charles M 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Like its classic predecessor, Asian Medical Systems , Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge significantly expands the study of Asian medicine. These essays ask how patients and practitioners know what they know - what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the authors offer an exciting range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The possessed and the dispossessed: spirits, identity, and power in a Madagascar migrant town 
Author: Sharp, Lesley Alexandra
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Medical  Anthropology | Women's Studies | Indigenous Religions
Publisher's Description: This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power. These women, Leslie Sharp argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, Sharp's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba , or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identities of insiders and outsiders in this community, which draws people from all over the island and abroad.Sharp's study also reveals the contradictions between indigenous healing and Western-derived Protestant healing and psychiatry. Particular attention to the significance of migrant women's and children's experiences in a context of seeking relief from personal and social ills gives Sharp's investigation importance for gender studies as well as for studies in medical anthropology, Africa and Madagascar, the politics of culture, and religion and ritual.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Reproduction and social organization in Sub-Saharan Africa 
Author: Lesthaeghe, Ron J 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: African Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Unlike most Asian and Latin American countries, sub-Saharan Africa has seen both an increase in population growth rates and a weakening of traditional patterns of child-spacing since the 1960s. It is tempting to conclude that sub-Saharan countries have simply not reached adequate levels of income, education, and urbanization for a fertility decline to occur. This book argues, however, that such a socioeconomic threshold hypothesis will not provide an adequate basis for comparison. These authors take the view that any reproductive regime is also anchored to a broader pattern of social organization, including the prevailing modes of production, rules of exchange, patterns of religious systems, kinship structure, division of labor, and gender roles. They link the characteristic features of the African reproductive regime with regard to nuptiality, polygyny, breastfeeding, postpartum abstinence, sterility, and child-fostering to other specifically African characteristics of social organization and culture. Substantial attention is paid to the heterogeneity that prevails among sub-Saharan societies and considerable use is made, therefore, of interethnic comparisons. As a result the book goes considerably beyond mere demographic description and builds bridges between demography and anthropology or sociology.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: A simple matter of salt: an ethnography of nutritional deficiency in Spain 
Author: Fernandez, Renate Lellep
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology
Similar Items

Title: Stories in the time of cholera: racial profiling during a medical nightmare
Author: Briggs, Charles L 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Disease | Medical  Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past? It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological notions of "culture" in deflecting blame away from their institutions and onto the victims themselves. The disease, the space of the Orinoco Delta, and the "indigenous ethnic group" who suffered cholera all came to seem somehow synonymous. One of the major threats to people's health worldwide is this deadly cycle of passing the blame. Carefully documenting how stigma, stories, and statistics circulate across borders, this first-rate ethnography demonstrates that the process undermines all the efforts of physicians and public health officials and at the same time contributes catastrophically to epidemics not only of cholera but also of tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and other killers. The authors have harnessed their own outrage over what took place during the epidemic and its aftermath in order to make clear the political and human stakes involved in the circulation of narratives, resources, and germs.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Susto, a folk illness
Author: Rubel, Arthur J
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Widespread throughout Latin America, susto is a folk illness associated with a broad array of symptoms. It is considered by susceptible populations to be a sickness caused by the separation of soul and body which is precipitated by a supernatural force. Most studies of culture-bound diseases have relied on descriptive approaches that focus on pathologies derived from medical textbooks. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, looking for explanations of susto in the interaction of social, physiological, and psychological factors.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Taming the wind of desire: psychology, medicine, and aesthetics in Malay shamanistic performance
Author: Laderman, Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Medical  Anthropology | Psychology | Southeast Asia | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Charged with restoring harmony and relieving pain, the Malay shaman places his patients in trance and encourages them to express their talents, drives, personality traits - the "Inner Winds" of Malay medical lore - in a kind of performance. These healing ceremonies, formerly viewed by Western anthropologists as exotic curiosities, actually reveal complex multicultural origins and a unique indigenous medical tradition whose psychological content is remarkably relevant to contemporary Western concerns.Accepted as apprentice to a Malay shaman, Carol Laderman learned and recorded every aspect of the healing seance and found it comparable in many ways to the traditional dramas of Southeast Asia and of other cultures such as ancient Greece, Japan, and India. The Malay seance is a total performance, complete with audience, stage, props, plot, music, and dance. The players include the patient along with the shaman and his troupe. At the center of the drama are pivotal relationships - among people, between humans and spirits, and within the self. The best of the Malay shamans are superb poets, dramatists, and performers as well as effective healers of body and soul.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Testing testing: social consequences of the examined life 
Author: Hanson, F. Allan 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Sociology | Medical  Anthropology | Psychiatry
Similar Items

Title: Total confinement: madness and reason in the maximum security prison
Author: Rhodes, Lorna A. (Lorna Amarasingham)
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Medicine | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the "supermaximums" - and the mental health units that complement them - Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an exposé, Total Confinement is a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society. Rhodes tackles difficult questions about the extreme conditions of confinement, the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, and an ever-advancing technology of isolation and surveillance. Using her superb interview skills and powers of observation, she documents how prisoners, workers, and administrators all struggle to retain dignity and a sense of self within maximum security institutions. In settings that place in question the very humanity of those who live and work in them, Rhodes discovers complex interactions - from the violent to the tender - among prisoners and staff. Total Confinement offers an indispensable close-up of the implications of our dependence on prisons to solve long-standing problems of crime and injustice in the United States.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Twice dead: organ transplants and the reinvention of death
Author: Lock, Margaret M
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Ethics | Sociology | Sociology | Ethics | Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as "brain dead" are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place. In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the discourse over the past thirty years that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain, and its routinization in clinical practice in North America. She compares this situation with that in Japan where, despite the availability of the necessary technology and expertise, brain death was legally recognized only in 1997, and then under limited and contested circumstances. Twice Dead explores the cultural, historical, political, and clinical reasons for the ready acceptance of the new criterion of death in North America and its rejection, until recently, in Japan, with the result that organ transplantation has been severely restricted in that country. This incisive and timely discussion demonstrates that death is not self-evident, that the space between life and death is historically and culturally constructed, fluid, multiple, and open to dispute. In addition to an analysis of that professional literature on and popular representations of the subject, Lock draws on extensive interviews conducted over ten years with physicians working in intensive care units, transplant surgeons, organ recipients, donor families, members of the general public in both Japan and North America, and political activists in Japan opposed to the recognition of brain death. By showing that death can never be understood merely as a biological event, and that cultural, medical, legal, and political dimensions are inevitably implicated in the invention of brain death, Twice Dead confronts one of the most troubling questions of our era.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Under the medical gaze: facts and fictions of chronic pain
Author: Greenhalgh, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Medical  Anthropology | Physical Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medicine | Gender Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: This compelling account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain. It is a medical whodunit full of mysterious misdiagnosis, subtle power plays, and shrewd detective work. Setting a new standard for the practice of autoethnography, Susan Greenhalgh presents a case study of her intense encounter with an enthusiastic young specialist who, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, became convinced she had a painful, essentially untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. Greenhalgh traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis on her inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Under the Medical Gaze serves as a powerful illustration of medicine's power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. Greenhalgh ultimately learns that she had been misdiagnosed and begins the long process of undoing the physical and emotional damage brought about by her nearly catastrophic treatment. In considering how things could go so awry, she embarks on a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical discourse and practice in the United States. She develops fresh arguments about the power of medicine to medicalize our selves and lives, the seductions of medical science, and the deep, psychologically rooted difficulties women patients face in interactions with male physicians. In the end, Under the Medical Gaze goes beyond the critique of biomedicine to probe the social roots of chronic pain and therapeutic alternatives that rely on neither the body-cure of conventional medicine nor the mind-cure of some alternative medicines, but rather a broader set of strategies that address the sociopolitical sources of pain.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: White plague, black labor: tuberculosis and the political economy of health and disease in South Africa
Author: Packard, Randall M 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Medicine | Medical  Anthropology | African Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Why does tuberculosis, a disease which is both curable and preventable, continue to produce over 50,000 new cases a year in South Africa, primarily among blacks? In answering this question Randall Packard traces the history of one of the most devastating diseases in twentieth-century Africa, against the background of the changing political and economic forces that have shaped South African society from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. These forces have generated a growing backlog of disease among black workers and their families and at the same time have prevented the development of effective public health measures for controlling it. Packard's rich and nuanced analysis is a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on South Africa's social history as well as to the history of medicine and the political economy of health.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Writing at the margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine
Author: Kleinman, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical  Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Asian Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems - for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain - are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.   [brief]
Similar Items