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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.
“The essays in Cosmos, Gods, and Madmen range over a wide array of topics across multiple geographic areas… Not all of the chapters touch on all three of the terms in the book’s title, but they all contain important and fascinating ethnographic material and make some useful theoretical and methodological recommendations. It will not be news to any anthropologists that religion and supernatural agency is frequently implicated in the diagnosis and cure of illness, mental or otherwise, but the case studies are a welcome addition to the literature on medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion.” • Anthropology Review Database
““Despite high levels of unpredictability and uncertainty, and in some instances even the failure of miracles, what is most striking is the universal and powerful incentive and motivation behind this search. In terms of the book’s wider contribution, it provides an effective and timely response to the current comparative biomedical focus within medical anthropology, by reconnecting with its social origins.” • Anthropology & Medicine
“The introduction to this book is very well-written and lays out the topic and scope clearly… The chapters have been collected carefully and offer much to the study of religion and healing” • Stefan Ecks, University of Edinburgh
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