Dialogue and the Interpretation of Illness
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A01=Robert Pool
Author_Robert Pool
Bad Death
Bamenda Grassfields
Category=JHM
Category=PSX
Category=QRYX9
Category=VXWM
Category=VXWT
Chronic
Compound Head
Death Celebration
Drink Palm Wine
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eq_mind-body-spirit
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
Follow
Gift Market
Illness Bfaa
Kola Nut Trees
Kola Nuts
Limbum Term
Medical Ethnography
Medical Systems
Medicine Men
National Nutrition Survey
Palm Wine
Personalistic Etiologies
Pristine
Protein Energy Malnutrition
Single Twins
traditional African cosmology
tribal religion
Village Health Workers
Western Grassfields
witchcraft
Wo
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780854968732
- Weight: 710g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 11 May 1994
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Robert Pool London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
