As I’ve written about on this site before, one of the best short programs for anyone interested in culture and mental health is the Summer School in Social and Cultural Psychiatry held annually at McGill. The course at the center of the curriculum is “Cultural Psychiatry: A Critical Introduction” which consists primarily of lectures by Laurence Kirmayer, Allan Young…
Tag Archives: Healing
Book review – Sienna Craig’s Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine
Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine
University of California Press, 2012
344 pp., US$34.95 paperback
It is a truism that the world we live in today is increasingly interconnected. Yet, when it comes to medicine – and particularly “traditional” or alternative medicine – the tendency is often to delimit its study along …
Book Review: Pamela Klassen’s Spirits of Protestantism
Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity
University of California Press, 2011
348 pp., US $26.95 (paperback)
Reviewed by Wilson Will (Rice University)
Christianity and western medicine share a curious relationship in the social science literature. Historians (e.g., Porter 2005, Numbers and Amundsen (eds.) 1997, Risse 1999), have long acknowledged the political and epistemic interactions …
The rise and fall of the extrasense
This article is part of the series: Twenty years after the Soviet Union
In 1989, a well-timed visitor to the Soviet Union could bear witness to a very peculiar mass phenomenon. Public spaces would suddenly empty out—adults rushed home from work without so much as checking out what was on offer in the neighborhood store, children abandoned their games in the street, and the elderly women that occupied the benches outside virtually every …