Lemba, 1650-1930

Lemba, 1650-1930 PDF Author: John M. Janzen
Publisher: Scholarly Title
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description

Lemba, 1650-1930

Lemba, 1650-1930 PDF Author: John M. Janzen
Publisher: Scholarly Title
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description


Kongo: Power and Majesty

Kongo: Power and Majesty PDF Author: Alisa LaGamma
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588395758
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A fascinating account of the effects of turbulent history on one of Africa’s most storied kingdoms, Kongo: Power and Majesty presents over 170 works of art from the Kingdom of Kongo (an area that includes present-day Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola). The book covers 400 years of Kongolese culture, from the fifteenth century, when Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian merchants and missionaries brought Christianity to the region, to the nineteenth, when engagement with Europe had turned to colonial incursion and the kingdom dissolved under the pressures of displacement, civil war, and the devastation of the slave trade. The works of art—which range from depictions of European iconography rendered in powerful, indigenous forms to fearsome minkondi, or power figures—serve as an assertion of enduring majesty in the face of upheaval, and richly illustrate the book’s powerful thesis.

Ngoma

Ngoma PDF Author: John M. Janzen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520910850
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book 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.

Main Issues in Mental Health and Race

Main Issues in Mental Health and Race PDF Author: Dele Olajide
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351771930
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2003. This work arose out of the editors' concerns at the British preoccupation with an alleged epidemic of schizophrenia in people of African descent. Black people in contact with psychiatric services are commonly classed as schizophrenic or normal and do not seem to attract any of the diagnoses or interventions which their white counterparts do. The editors asked contributors to carry out a critical broad-based review of a particular area using the technology that has been developed for conducting systematic literature reviews. The areas explored were selected by the editors from their own understanding of disciplines which might have something to contribute. They were largely disciplines which have an interest in beliefs, feelings, emotions, thought, politics, language and decision-making. In some areas there was little material available from literature searches so the reviewers used their own understanding of the subject matter rather than existing literature to write critical essays.

Lose Your Mother

Lose Your Mother PDF Author: Saidiya Hartman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429966904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy. There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger—torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places—a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built to repel slave raiders—and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship. Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.

Medicine and Colonial Identity

Medicine and Colonial Identity PDF Author: Bridie Andrews
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134441185
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This volume shows how the study of medicine can provide new insights into colonial identity, and the possibility of accomodating multiple perspectives on identity within a single narrative.

Tongnaab

Tongnaab PDF Author: Jean Allman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253111838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history -- the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.

The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas

The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas PDF Author: Ulrike Schmieder
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 364310345X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
For centuries social and economic relations within the Atlantic space were dominated by slavery and the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas. By the slowly and arduously achieved end of this trade, slave labour in the Americas was replaced in many cases by other forms of coerced labour of African Caribbean people or Indian, Chinese, African or European immigrants. This book focuses on the transformation of societies after the slave trade and slavery in a comparative intercontinental perspective. It combines micro- and macro-historical approaches and looks at the agency of slaves, missionaries, abolitionists, state officials, seamen and soldiers.

A Nervous State

A Nervous State PDF Author: Nancy Rose Hunt
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
In A Nervous State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. Discarding catastrophe as narrative form, she instead brings alive a history of colonial nervousness. This mood suffused medical investigations, security operations, and vernacular healing movements. With a heuristic of two colonial states—one "nervous," one biopolitical—the analysis alternates between medical research into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." By the time of Belgian Congo’s famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility clinic stood near a bleak penal colony, both sited where a notorious Leopoldian rubber company once enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt’s history bursts with layers of perceptibility and song, conveying everyday surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese endured and evaded forced labor and medical and security screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease through healing, wonder, memory, and dance. This capacious medical history sheds light on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical concepts from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt provides a bold new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history.

The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire

The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire PDF Author: John M. Janzen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520032958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In this book, Dr. John M. Janzen describes patterns of healing among the BaKongo of Lower Zaire in Africa, who, like many peoples elsewhere, utilize cosmopolitan medicine alongside traditional healing practices. What criteria, he asks, determine the choice of the alternative therapies? And what is their institutional interrelationship? In seeking answers, he analyzes case histories and cultural contexts to explore what social transactions, decisionmaking, illness and therapy classifications, and resource allocations are used in the choice of therapy by the ill, their kinfolk, friends, asociates, and specialized practitioners. From the Preface: This book presents an "on the ground" ethnographic account of how medical clients of one region of Lower Zaire diagnose illness, select therapies, and evaluate treatments, a process we call "therapy management." The book is intended to clarify a phenomenon of which central African clients have long been cognizant, namely, that medical systems are used in combination. Our study is aimed primarily at readers interested in the practical issues of medical decision-making in an African country, the cultural content of symptoms, and the dynamics of medical pluralism, that is, the existence in a single society of differently designed and conceived medical systems.