During my first visit to Ghana in 1998, I was involved in a research project that looked at possible co-operations between healers and psychiatric clinics. I stayed in the healing camp of Prophet Abbam II, who was known in the area to heal patients with mental health problems. My presence at his healing church attracted many visitors, who kindly brought …
Tag Archives: Healing
Book Forum: Larisa Jašarević’s Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market
This article is part of the series: Book forum
In Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: An Intimate Debt, Larisa Jašarević explores the mutual entanglement between the economy, living body and the good life in postsocialist and postwar Bosnia. Beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated, this ethnography is a key addition to scholarly literature on debt, moral economies, medical anthropology, and material bodies. We are pleased to …
The Impossibility of the Inert: Placebo and the Essence of Healing
The concept of placebo is predicated on the opposition between active and inert, deploying this opposition to assert that an action or substance with no inherent active principle can have a paradoxical effect “as if” it were active.1 My thesis is that there is no such thing as the inert in human affairs, relationships, or experience. Think of the …
Christopher Dole’s Healing Secular Life
Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 291 pp.
Healing Secular Life is a study of the organizing force of secularism in contemporary Turkish life. Dole’s ethnographic entry is the practice of religious healing; specifically, the socially ambiguous work of two kinds of religious healer, the evliya or …
Anesthesia
Every sensation is a question, even if the only answer is silence. [i]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered his introductory lecture on anatomy and physiology to students at the Massachusetts Medical College in the fall of 1847, he noted that for the patient, thanks to ether, “the fierce extremity of suffering has …
Local Responses to Trauma and PTSD: a special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry
The latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry is devoted to “Local Responses to Trauma and PTSD.”
The Editorial Introduction by Devon E. Hinton and Laurence J. Kirmayer is titled “Local responses to trauma: Symptom, affect, and healing:”
…“This article provides an introduction to the thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry on local responses to trauma. To illustrate how local responses to trauma