Witchcraft As a Social Diagnosis

Witchcraft As a Social Diagnosis PDF Author: Roxane Richter
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9781498523202
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book examines medical outreach in the condemned witches' village of Gnani in Ghana, focusing on clashes between traditional beliefs, religious tenets, and contemporary medical science. It analyzes questions of stigmatization to explore how disease, injury, and illness relate to social condition and the dialogue surrounding witchcraft.

Witchcraft As a Social Diagnosis

Witchcraft As a Social Diagnosis PDF Author: Roxane Richter
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9781498523202
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book examines medical outreach in the condemned witches' village of Gnani in Ghana, focusing on clashes between traditional beliefs, religious tenets, and contemporary medical science. It analyzes questions of stigmatization to explore how disease, injury, and illness relate to social condition and the dialogue surrounding witchcraft.

Buruli Ulcer

Buruli Ulcer PDF Author: Gerd Pluschke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030111148
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
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.

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.

Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania

Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania PDF Author: Gábor Klaniczay
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319547569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
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.

Deadly Words

Deadly Words PDF Author: Jeanne Favret-Saada
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521297875
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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.

In the Devil's Snare

In the Devil's Snare PDF Author: Mary Beth Norton
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030742636X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study. In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft “victims” described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history.

Languages of Witchcraft

Languages of Witchcraft PDF Author: Stuart Clark
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 033398529X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Different conceptions of the world and of reality have made witchcraft possible in some societies and impossible in others. How did the people of early modern Europe experience it and what was its place in their culture? The new essays in this collection illustrate the latest trends in witchcraft research and in cultural history in general. After three decades in which the social analysis of witchcraft accusations has dominated the subject, they turn instead to its significance and meaning as a cultural phenomenon - to the 'languages' of witchcraft, rather than its causes. As a result, witchcraft seems less startling than it once was, yet more revealing of the world in which it occurred.

Witch Camps and Witchcraft Discourse in Africa

Witch Camps and Witchcraft Discourse in Africa PDF Author: Matthew Gmalifo Mabefam
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666918504
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
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.

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.

Sociology of Diagnosis

Sociology of Diagnosis PDF Author: PJ McGann
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 0857245767
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Offers an introduction to the sociology of diagnosis. This title presents articles that explore diagnosis as a process of definition that includes: labeling dynamics between diagnoser and diagnosed; boundary struggles between diverse constituents - both among medical practitioners and between medical authorities and others; and, more.