Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa

Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa
Author: Sandra Fancello
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350295469

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Based on ethnographic studies conducted in several African countries, this volume analyses the phenomenon of deliverance – which is promoted both in charismatic churches and in Islam as a weapon against witchcraft – in order to clarify the political dimensions of spiritual warfare in contemporary African societies. Deliverance from evil is part and parcel of the contemporary discourse on the struggle against witchcraft in most African contexts. However, contributors show how its importance extends beyond this, highlighting a pluralism of approaches to deliverance in geographically distant religious movements, which coexist in Africa. Against this background, the book reflects on the responsibilities of Pentecostal deliverance politics within the condition of 'epistemic anxiety' of contemporary African societies – to shed light on complex relational dimensions in which individual deliverance is part of a wider social and spiritual struggle. Spanning across the study of religion, healing and politics, this book contributes to ongoing debates about witchcraft and deliverance in Africa.

Working with Spirit

Working with Spirit
Author: Jo Thobeka Wreford
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857450158

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In the current model of health dispensation in South Africa there are two major paradigms, the spirit-inspired tradition of izangoma sinyanga and biomedicine. These operate at best in parallel, but more often than not are at odds with one another. This book, based on the author’s personal experience as a practitioner of traditional African medicine, considers the effects of the absence of spirit in biomedicine on collaborative relationships. Given the unprecedented challenge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, the author suggests that more cooperation is vital. Taking a critical look at the role of anthropology in this endeavor, she proposes the development of a “language of spirit” by means of which the spirit-inspired aetiology of izangoma sinyanga may be made comprehensible to academic scientists and applicable to medical interventions. The author discusses white izangoma in the context of current debates on healing and hybridity and insists that there exists a powerful role for izangoma in the realm of societal healing. Above all, the book constitutes a start in what the author hopes will develop into an ongoing intellectual conversation between traditional African healing, academe, and biomedicine in South Africa.

Borders and Healers

Borders and Healers
Author: Tracy J. Luedke
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2006
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 0253346630

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In southeast Africa, the power to heal is often associated with crossing borders, whether literal or metaphorical. This wide-ranging volume reveals that healers, whose power depends on the ability to broker therapeutic resources, also contribute to the construction of the borders they transgress. While addressing diverse healing practices such as herbalism, razor-blade vaccination, spirit possession, prophetic healing, missionary health clinics, and traumatic storytelling, the nine lively and provocative essays in Borders and Healers explore the creativity and resilience of the region's healers and those they heal in a world shaped by economic stagnation, declining state commitments to health care, and the AIDS pandemic. This important book contributes to understandings of the ways in which healing practices in southeast Africa mediate divides between the wealthy and the impoverished, the traditional and the modern, the local and the global.

Charismatic Renewal in Africa

Charismatic Renewal in Africa
Author: Mika Vähäkangas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2003
Genre: Africa, Sub-Saharan
ISBN:

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Interconnectivity, Subversion, and Healing in World Christianity

Interconnectivity, Subversion, and Healing in World Christianity
Author: Afe Adogame
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2023-07-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350333409

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The rise of Christianity around the world has been the impetus for much religious and social change. The interconnectivity of religious centers has resulted in theological dialogue and innovation. The subversion of long-held categories of culture, gender, race, spirituality, theology, and politics has naturally occurred along with the transgressing of borders and boundaries. Yet at the same time, there has been occasion for healing through intercultural experiences of forgiveness, peacemaking, and reconciliation. Stimulated by the work and mentorship of Joel Carpenter, who has done much to expand the study of world Christianity less through focusing on his own research and writing, and more through amplifying the voices of others, the international contributors to this volume from all six continents promote a deeper understanding of World Christianity through the exploration of such related themes. Whether discussing primal spirituality in northeast India, white supremacy in South Africa, evangelical women and civic engagement in Kenya, or Calvinism in Mexico, the contributors draw upon ethnographic case studies to more deeply understand interconnectivity, subversion, and healing in World Christianity. Their essays provoke a reorientation of Christian thought within the study of World Christianity, enriching the current discourse and promoting vistas for further interdisciplinary studies.

The Professionalisation of African Medicine

The Professionalisation of African Medicine
Author: Murray Last
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 042981612X

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Originally published in 1986, this book draws upon a range of authors to reflect wide interest in systematising traditional medicine, and to include material on significant instances of regulation or organisation. It was the first book to study the efforts of traditional healers and their newly formed professional associations and as such constitutes a pioneering collection of sources. Because of the changing position of traditional medicine it may well also be a unique record: before long what is described here will largely have disappeared.

The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa

The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa
Author: Steven Feierman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 1992-09-22
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0520066812

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These essays are an account of disease, health and healing practices on the African continent. The contributors all emphasize the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present.

Media Portrayal of African Indigenous Healers

Media Portrayal of African Indigenous Healers
Author: Leslie S. Nthoi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre:
ISBN:

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This book is the culmination of a study located at the intersection of religion, modernity and popular culture. As a contribution to the bourgeoning field of Nollywood studies, this book examines the broad topic of electronic media and the social construction, mediation and remediation of the images of reality. It assesses how the media's elective collaboration with neo-charismatic Pentecostal Christianity creates and disseminates a postmodernist culture in which the African indigenous healer has become irrelevant in contemporary Nigerian society. Nollywood's obsession with the profit imperative and its co-option by neo-Charismatic Pentecostalism has made it a neo-imperialist Pentecostal evangelical tool that partakes in the demonisation of African indigenous spirituality. Consequently, it perpetuates the longstanding legacy of the negative portrayal of African indigenous healers.

From Where Does the Bad Wind Blow?

From Where Does the Bad Wind Blow?
Author: Katerina Mildnerová
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2015
Genre: Diseases
ISBN: 3643902735

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This study deals with the phenomenon of spiritual healing and witchcraft within the field of indigenous medicine and African Independent Churches in the contemporary urban setting of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Grounded in theoretical concepts of medical and symbolical anthropology, the book analyzes the syncretic character of medical culture and the so-called "therapy shopping" phenomenon. Special attention is paid to the local conceptualization of health, illness and body, cultural aetiology, the social and cultural representation of spirit possession and witchcraft, as well as a description of different types of healers along with their diagnostic and therapeutic praxis. A separate section is dedicated to the symbolical interpretation of witchcraft on the level of theory, system, and practice, based on different case studies. (Series: Anthropology / Ethnologie - Vol. 49) [Subject: Anthropology, African Studies, Religious Studies, Spiritualism, Cultural Studies]

The Healing Wisdom of Africa

The Healing Wisdom of Africa
Author: Malidoma Patrice Some
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 345
Release: 1999-09-13
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 087477991X

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Through The Healing Wisdom of Africa, readers can come to understand that the life of indigenous and traditional people is a paradigm for an intimate relationship with the natural world that both surrounds us and is within us. The book is the most complete study of the role ritual plays in the lives of African people--and the role it can play for seekers in the West.