Culture Knowledge And Healing

This book engages topical and problematic issues regarding the impacts of cultural change on traditional healing beliefs and practices in both developing and developed nations. It describes issues ranging from the attrition of cultural heritage knowledge, or traditional knowledge (TK), to the implications of unconventional modern and traditional healing in various guises encountered during projects that entailed research fieldwork in communities of Australia, Africa and within institutions of mainstream healthcare in the United States. Furthermore, it explores philosophical aspects of contemporary complementary medicine practices. This book has pertinence for many practitioners and consumers of traditional non-medical forms of health practices, and relevance for the theoretical body of understanding related to these diverse fields. In particular, the individual chapters describe topics important to indigenous persons, people living in rural areas, those with mental illnesses, practitioners of Chinese medicine and massage therapy, practitioners and consumers of traditional Western herbal medicine, social theorists interested in unconventional health domains, and US veterans seeking adjunctive wellbeing care and advice alongside medical treatment, It also provides a chapter with information dedicated to their medical and complementary wellbeing providers. In the contemporary context, for Western countries such as US, UK and Australia, non-biomedical treatments are generally grouped together under the common term Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), or more recently Complementary and Integrative Healthcare (CIH). In developing countries such as Africa, and in relation to indigenous healing (for instance, in many communities in remote Australia where there is a concentrated population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people), heritage healing practices and unconventional approaches to healthcare, including spiritually-focused and specific cultural approaches to managing diseases, may instead be termed traditional healing. Much health research today is geared towards securing quantitative outcomes that fortify the significant gains advanced by biomedicine in treating disease. However, the global spread of biomedical practices and ways of conceptualising health unfortunately follows in the footsteps of centuries of Western social and economic global colonisation, and thereby represents a current ongoing process of deep colonisation. The cultural shift brought about by this process has wrought deep and lasting changes in the body of heritage practices and beliefs that belong to culturally-situated healing traditions, and in the retention of TK associated with such healing. This book presents several chapters of anthropological and qualitative research, which contribute to literature describing this process of cultural change and its impacts. It offers suggestions and commentary regarding the value of CAM and traditional healing to: 1) Promote wellbeing; 2) preserve traditional knowledge and medicinal plant species; 3) address specific health problems and the needs of population groups; and 4) extend a willingness to accept and incorporate essential CAM healthcare services, holistic beliefs and new understandings of well-being, alongside Western biomedicine.

Abstract: An historical perspective of disease and healing practices as related to culture is addressed in 57 papers for students and professionals in the medical and health fields. The papers are organized among 14 major themes, addressing: medical anthropology; paleopathology; disease ecology and epidemiology; medical systems and theories relative to disease and therapy; sociocultural influences and ethnic practices in disease diagnosis; sorcery and witchcraft; disease prevention via social controls; surgery practices and population control in the preindustrial era; cultural and environmental factors relative to stress, pain, and death; cultural influences on behavioral disorders; the special role of the inflicted in society; and current primitive healing practices and the impact of sociocultural change on such practices. (wz).

"A valuable collection. . . . The essays in the volume are all fresh, the result of recent work, and the opening chapter by Garro and Mattingly places the current trend in narrative analysis in historical context, explaining its diverse origins (and constructs) in a range of disciplines."—Shirley Lindenbaum, author of Kuru Sorcery "A good place to consult the narrative turn in medical anthropology. Thick with the richness and diversity and stubborn resistance to interpretations of human stories of illness. An anthropological antidote for too narrow a framing of the complex tangle of ways-of-being and ways-of-telling that make medicine a space of indelibly human experiences." —Arthur Kleinman, author of The Illness Narratives

Emotional, as well as physical distress, is a heritage from our hominid ancestors; it has been experienced by every group of human beings since our emergence as a species. And every known culture has developed systems of conceptualization and intervention for addressing it. The editors have brought together leading psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and others to consider the interaction of psychosocial, biological, and cultural variables as they influence the assessment of health and illness and the course of therapy. The volume includes broadly conceived theoretical and survey chapters; detailed descriptions of specific healing traditions in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the Arab world. The Handbook of Culture, Therapy, and Healing is a unique resource, containing information about Western therapies practiced in non-Western cultures, non-Western therapies practiced both in their own context and in the West.

Guided by the concept of synergy, this groundbreaking collection explores alternatives in the areas of counseling, education, and community health and development. Synergy refers to the process of two or more things coming together to create a new, greater, and often-unexpected whole. When synergy exists, formerly scarce resources can expand and become renewable and accessible to all. Drawing upon the diverse cultural experiences of Aboriginal groups in North America and around the world, these compelling narratives provide practical insights into the emergence of synergy and obstacles to its existence. Synergy, Healing and Empowerment offers invaluable guidance in the pursuit of a just and equitable society.

Kananoja demonstrates how medical interaction in early modern Atlantic Africa was characterised by continuous knowledge exchange between Africans and Europeans.