Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa

Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa PDF Author: Isak Arnold Niehaus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This biography casts new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between politics, witchcraft and AIDS in South Africa.

Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa

Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa PDF Author: Isak Arnold Niehaus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This biography casts new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between politics, witchcraft and AIDS in South Africa.

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa PDF Author: Adam Ashforth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226029733
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Large numbers of people in Soweto & other parts of South Africa live in fear of witchcraft, presenting complex & unique problems for the government. Adam Ashforth explores the challenge of occult violence & the spiritual insecurity that it engenders to democratic rule in South Africa.

Madumo, a Man Bewitched

Madumo, a Man Bewitched PDF Author: Adam Ashforth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226029726
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In a true story of a man bewitched, set against the turbulent backdrop of contemporary Soweto, Ashforth shows that witchcraft is not simply superstition but a complex response to spiritual insecurity in a troubling time of political and economic upheaval.

Encounters with Witchcraft

Encounters with Witchcraft PDF Author: Norman N. Miller
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438443595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
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.

Biomedical Hegemony and Democracy in South Africa

Biomedical Hegemony and Democracy in South Africa PDF Author: Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004436421
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In Biomedical Hegemony and Democracy in South Africa Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta and Tabi Chama-James Tabenyang unpack the contentious South African government’s post-apartheid policy framework of the ‘‘return to tradition policy’’. The conjuncture between deep sociopolitical crises, witchcraft, the ravaging HIV/AIDS pandemic and the government’s initial reluctance to adopt antiretroviral therapy turned away desperate HIV/AIDS patients to traditional healers. Drawing on historical sources, policy documents and ethnographic interviews, Pemunta and Tabenyang convincingly demonstrate that despite biomedical hegemony, patients and members of their therapy-seeking group often shuttle between modern and traditional medicine, thereby making both systems of healthcare complementary rather than alternatives. They draw the attention of policy-makers to the need to be aware of ‘‘subaltern health narratives’’ in designing health policy.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa PDF Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119251486
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

Reimagining Social Medicine from the South

Reimagining Social Medicine from the South PDF Author: Abigail H. Neely
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021586
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine's possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa. The PCHC's focus on medical and social factors of health yielded remarkable success. And yet South Africa's systemic racial inequality hindered health center work, and witchcraft illnesses challenged a program rooted in the sciences. To understand Pholela's successes and failures, Neely interrogates the “social” in social medicine. She makes clear that the social sciences the PCHC used failed to account for the roles that Pholela's residents and their environment played in the development and success of its program. At the same time, the PCHC's reliance on biomedicine prevented it from recognizing the impact on health of witchcraft illnesses and the social relationships from which they emerged. By rewriting the story of social medicine from Pholela, Neely challenges global health practitioners to recognize the multiple worlds and actors that shape health and healing in Africa and beyond.

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft PDF Author: Knut Rio
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319560689
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia—where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.

White Witch Doctor

White Witch Doctor PDF Author: John A. Hunt
Publisher: Cumberland House
ISBN: 9781930754331
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Dr. John Hunt has written a powerful true story of life and death, hope and despair in Apartheid South Africa. It details Dr. Hunt's fight to save his beloved country during a violent time of social unrest and political upheaval.

Evil in Africa

Evil in Africa PDF Author: William C. Olsen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253017505
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.