Cosmos, Gods and Madmen Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine [Hardcover]

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.

Acknowledgements

Introduction:Divinity, Disease, Distress
Roland Littlewood and Rebecca Lynch

Chapter 1.Why Animism Matters
David Napier

Chapter 2.Spreading the Gospel of the Miracle Cure: Panamas Black Christ
Rodney J. Reynolds

Chapter 3.Madness and Miracles: Hoping for Healing in Rural Ghana
Ursula M. Read

Chapter 4.Sakawa Rumours: Occult Internet Fraud and Ghanaian Identity
Alice Armstrong

Chapter 5.To Heal the Body is to Heal Oneself: The Body as Congregation
Isabelle Lange

Chapter 6.Addiction and the Duality of the Self in a North American Religio-Therapeutic Community
Ellie Reynolds

Chapter 7.Religious Conversion and Madness: Contested Territory in the Peruvian Andes
David M.R. Orr

Chapter 8.Cosmologies of Fear: The Medicalisation of Anxiety in Contemporary Britain
Rebecca Lynch

Chapter 9.Functionalists and Zombis: Sorcery alS(