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.
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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: Panama’s 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 as Spandrel and Social Rescue
Roland Littlewood
Chapter 10. Religion and Psychosis: A Common Evolutionary Trajectory?
Simon Dein
Index
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Rebecca Lynch is an Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). She has conducted fieldwork in Trinidad and the UK. Taking an approach that crosses the intersection between religion and medicine, she has published on socio-cultural, moral, and scientific constructions of the body, health and illness, and on bodily interaction with the non-human through technology, protocols, bodily fluids, and spirit agents.