Books in the Epistemologies of Healing series

Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient's recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch through rituals showing that the community and the ancestral spirits side with the victim. In contrast to biomedicine, their magic and divination introduce moral values that assess the state of the system and that remove the obstacles to what is taken as key: self-healing. The implied 'sensory shifts' and therapeutic effectiveness have largely eluded the literature on witchcraft. This book shows how to comprehend culture other than through the prism of identity politics. It offers a framework to comprehend the rise of witch killings and human sacrifice, just as ritual initiation disappears.

There is a growing interest in studies that document the relationship between science and medicine-as ideas, practices, technologies and outcomes-across cultural, national, geographic terrain. Tibetan medicine is not only known as a scholarly medical tradition among other Asian medical systems...

Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called "humoral medical traditions," as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years.

Through an ethnography of the social and medical worlds of a community of Tibetan refugees in India, this book addresses two main questions: first, how has the prolonged displacement of Tibetan refugees affected concepts of health in the exile community? Second, how has exile changed traditional Tibetan medical practices? It explores how social changes linked to exile have influenced concepts of health and illness in the Tibetan refugee community of Dharamsala and by looking at recent changes in the theory and practice of traditional Tibetan medicine investigates the role of traditional Tibetan medicine in sustaining public health in the exile community.

Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices, such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as "natural" and unproblematic, we sometimes seek to bypass, circumvent, or even transcend the dominant ideologies...

This volume focuses on the micro-politics of illness, treatment and death in order to offer innovative insights into the complex processes that shape individual and community responses to AIDS. The contributions describe the dilemmas that families, communities and health professionals face...

Expanding our understanding of contagion further than typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about the epidemic and contagious potential of specific infections and non-infectious conditions.

Notions of magic and healing have been changing over past years and are now understood as reflecting local ideas of power and agency, as well as structures of self, subjectivity and affect. This study focuses on contemporary urban Russia and, through exploring social conditions, conveys the experience of living that makes magic logical. By following people's own interpretations of the work of magic, the author succeeds in unraveling the logic of local practice and local understanding of affliction, commonly used to diagnose the experiences of illness and misfortune.