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The Politics of Storytelling
Hannah Arendt argued that the “political” is best understood as a power relation between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge between these realms—a site where individualized passions and shared perspectives are contested and interwoven. Jackson explores and expands Arendt’s ideas through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are and are not told, and exploring the various ways in which narrative reworkings of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson shows how storytelling may restore existential viability to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and situation.
Hope and Uncertainty in Health and Medicine
In health and medicine, imagining the future is essential in giving meaning to the past and the present and for propelling people into action. This is true not only at the level of individuals as they envision and carry out everyday activities and long-term plans but also for institutional practices framed by and unfolding within various socio-political ecologies and transfigurations. Hope and uncertainty are critical affective and knowledge-related modalities of such imaginations and assume vital meanings in policing, managing, and experiencing health, illness, and well-being. This volume brings together contributions from medical anthropologists who address this theme across various medical spheres, including the pragmatics of hope and uncertainty, the techno-sphere, health management, and individual and socially distributed emotions.
Spirituality, Healing and Medicine
The spiritual factors associated with healing are increasingly being acknowledged by modern medicine. Our definition of what constitutes health has expanded beyond the purely medical, yet the delivery of modern medicine to the patient often fails to take this into account. Doctors, anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists have all written on the subject, but thus far the literature has been fragmented between the disciplines. David Aldridge presents the first unified approach to the subject. In Spirituality, Healing and Medicine he evaluates the existing literature from across the disciplines to ascertain just how effective and influential spiritual healing may be on the patient's physical and psychological well-being. He encourages us to redefine treatment strategies and the ways in which we understand health, and argues that the spiritual elements of experience help the patient to find purpose, meaning and hope in the face of sickness. It is in the understanding of suffering and the need for deliverance from it, he suggests, that the traditions and aims of medicine and spirituality meet.
Peripheral Methodologies
This book examines how the peripheral can be incorporated into ethnographic research, and reflects on what it means to be on the periphery—ontologically and epistemologically. Starting from the premise that clarity and fixity as ideals of modernity prevent us from approaching that which cannot be easily captured and framed into scientific boundaries, the book argues for remaining on the boundary between the known and the unknown in order to surpass this ethnographic limit. It shows that peripherality is not only to be seen as a marginal condition, but rather as a form of theory-making and practice that incorporates reflexivity and experimentation.
No Place for Grief
Through a detailed ethnographic account of the everyday lives of detainees' wives in the occupied Palestinian Territory, No Place for Grief reveals the ways in which the normalization of these women's distress is intrinsically and painfully linked to the collective struggle for freedom from the occupation.
Matters of Life and Longing
This book presents and describes Northeast Brazilian women's motives for accepting and often actively seeking sterilization. It centers on individual subjects and their life-worlds but shows, too, that immersion in lived phenomenological worlds does not preclude the study of political economy. The book is written in a lucid and accessible language and will be of interest to a wide and varied audience, including both graduate and undergraduate students. This book merited an Honorable Mention in the competition for the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize in Gender and Health 2004
An Anthropology of Absence
In studying material culture, anthropologists and archaeologists use meaningful physical objects from a culture to help understand the less tangible aspects of that culture, such as societal structure, rituals, and values. What happens when these objects are destroyed, by war, natural disaster, or other historical events? Through detailed explanations of eleven international case studies, the contributions reveal that the absence of objects can be just as telling as their presence, while the objects created to memorialize a loss also have important cultural implications. Covering everything from organ donation, to funerary rituals, to prisoners of war, The Archaeology of Absence is written at an important intersection of archaeological and anthropological study. Divided into three sections, this volume uses the "presence" of absence to compare cultural perceptions of: material qualities and created memory, the mind/body connection, temporality, and death. This rich text provides a strong theoretical framework for anthropologists and archaeologists studying material culture.
Migration and Making an Income in the Context of ‘Human Trafficking’
The book focuses on volatile processes at the South African-Zimbabwean border that arise from practices of migration and income generating activities. The processes are influenced by neoliberal developments and controversial discourses on migration, commercial sexual services, and human trafficking. In this unstable environment, different actors continuously negotiate, trying to achieve stable positions. By addressing issues related to migration and income generating activities, they maneuver between legal rules and their own moral values and interests. In their attempt to classify incidents in the border context that are unclear to them, actors’ explanations are partly based on the concep...
The Attempt to Stay
The construction of the Merowe Dam along the Nile in northern Sudan flooded local villages and forced thousands of inhabitants to flee to higher ground. Despite the radical social and environmental transformations and an uncertain future, the Manasir have tried to continue their peasant way of life and resisted relocating to state-run resettlement schemes. Rather than focusing on migration and resettlement, the author follows the people’s attempts to preserve their homeland and have meaningful lives along the emerging reservoir. The book grapples with the fundamental question of how to re-establish life in a world that is falling apart.
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing
This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.
