Dialogue and the Interpretation of Illness - Couverture souple

Pool, Robert

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1859730167 ISBN 13 : 9781859730164

Editeur : Routledge, 1994

Synopsis

The etiology of the Wimbum people in the Western Grassfields of Cameroon is described through an examination of the way in which the meanings of key concepts, used to interpret and explain illness and other forms of misfortune, are continually being produced and reproduced in the praxis of everyday communication. During the course of numerous dialogues, witchcraft, a highly ambivalent force, gradually emerges as the prime mover. As destructive cannibals or respectable elders the witches are the ultimate cause of all significant illness, misfortune and death, and as diviners they are also the ultimate judges who apportion moral responsibility. Even the ancestors and the traditional gods turn out to be fronts behind which the witches hide their activities.The study is on three levels: a medical anthropological exploration of explanations of illness and misfortune; a detailed ethnography of traditional African cosmology and witchcraft; and an examination of recent theoretical issues in anthropology such as the nature of ethnographic fieldwork and the possibility of dialogical or postmodern ethnography.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Robert Pool London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Date d'édition: 1994
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1859730167
• ISBN 13: 9781859730164
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 298
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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