| Death in Abeyance: Illness and Therapy Among the Tabwa of Central Africa Contributor(s): Davis, Christopher (Author) |
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ISBN: 0748613056 ISBN-13: 9780748613052 Publisher: Edinburgh University Press OUR PRICE: $38.90 Product Type: Paperback Published: July 2000 Annotation: An ethnography of the Tabwa people of Zaire and their categories of illness, medicine, divination and healing. Rich in case material, the text offers an understanding of an African approach to body parts, illnesses, symptoms and personal features through to actual methods of diagnosis, prognosis, and cure. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Medical | Alternative & Complementary Medicine - History | Africa - General |
| Dewey: 305.8 |
| LCCN: 2001326023 |
| Series: International African Library |
| Physical Information: 0.77" H x 6.15" W x 9.21" (1.38 lbs) 342 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - African |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This is a comprehensive survey, in both its theory and its practice, of the Tabwa who live on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of Congo (fomerly Zaire). The following topics are covered: concepts of the body and of illness, illness categories and approaches to diagnosis, divination and the meaning of illness in the life-histories of individuals and lineage groups. Moving to a broader perspective, it embraces therapies both of bodily events ('medicine') and of social circumstances ('magic' and 'religion'), and relates them to the cosmological beliefs which link and underwrite all three.Based on nearly four years of fieldwork, Dr Davis' book is the most complete study so far of an African therapeutic system. In contrast to most ethnographies of medicine, which take social structures as primary and treat medical knowledge as an extension or reflection of it, this study focuses on the medical system itself. When medicine is thus considered first as an indigenous or vernacular science, it is soon seen that much of what passes for an inderstanding of ritual, magic and religion in Africa is thin and misconceived.Death in Abeyance was awarded the 2002 Wellcome Medal (Royal Anthropological Institute). |