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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.

Roland Littlewood is Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at UCL. He is a former president of the RAI and has undertaken fieldwork in Trinidad, Haiti, Lebanon, Italy and Albania, and has published eight books and around 200 papers.

Rebecca Lynch is an Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). She has conducted fieldwork in Trinidad and the UK. Taking an approach that crosses the intersection between religion and medicine, she has published on socio-cultural, moral, and scientific constructions of the body, health and illness, and on bodily interaction with the non-human through technology, protocols, bodily fluids, and spirit agents.