Cosmos, gods and madmen : frameworks in the anthropologies of medicine / edited by Roland Littlewood and Rebecca Lynch.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Littlewood, Roland, editor.

Lynch, Rebecca (Research fellow), editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical anthropology.

Medicine--Religious aspects.

Medicine.

Cosmology.

Physical Description:

214 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Berghahn Books, 2016.

Summary:

The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the human constitution, its ills and its healing and, in particular, ways which determine and limit our very possibilities. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : divinity, disease, distress / Roland Littlewood and Rebecca Lynch

Why animism matters / A. David Napier

Spreading the gospel of the miracle cure / Rodney J. Reynolds

Madness and miracles / Ursula M. Read

Sakawa rumours / Alice Armstrong

To heal the body is to heal oneself / Isabelle Lange

Addiction and the duality of the self in a North American religio-therapeutic community / Ellie Reynolds

Religious conversion and madness / David M.R. Orr

Cosmologies of fear / Rebecca Lynch

Functionalists and zombis / Roland Littlewood

Religion and psychosis / Simon Dein.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781785331770

1785331779

OCLC:

929589794