Medical Anthropology
February 17, 2025
Lewis Daly
2 citations
This article concerns vernacular practices of "self-help" among the indigenous Makushi people of Amazonian Guyana. Contrasted with "Western" self-care, the article examines mayu, a traditional system of communal work grounded in a collaborative ethic of "helping each other out." A convivial event, mayu is always accompanied by feasting, drinking, and the celebration of social relationships....
Medical Anthropology
October 2, 2024
Alex K. Gearin
1 citation
Shamans, neo-shamans, atheists, and others describe gaining special knowledge from drinking ayahuasca, supporting the cross-cultural idea of ayahuasca as a plant teacher. While secular enthusiasts interpret this metaphorically, animists and others take it literally. This article examines ontological collisions at a healing retreat in the Peruvian Amazon, considering Shipibo shamans and their...
Medical Anthropology
January 11, 2024
M. T. Høybye, Lise Marie Andersen, Hanne Bess Boelsbjerg
ABSTRACT Healthcare professionals use various technologies to evaluate and support patients who have suffered severe brain injuries. They integrate monitoring and sensory assessments into their clinical practice, and these assessments can have an impact on treatment decisions and prognostication. Responses from patients during different interactions are interpreted as “signs of consciousness”...
Medical Anthropology
2022
Margit Anne Petersen, Aja Smith, Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen et al.
12 citations
Coping with crisis is fundamental for human life, but so is the pursuit of everything good and fruitful. We revisit Foucault's technologies of the self as an analytical lens for what people do when pursuing a good life in contemporary Denmark. Comparing three emerging self-improvement domains; psychedelic micro-dosing, meditation and mindfulness, and fitness self-tracking, we explore processes...
Medical Anthropology
2021
Asaf Sharabi
11 citations
Being a medium of a god is common and normative in the Western Himalayas. In this article I present a case of three mediums who were regarded with mixed feelings by society, because their mediumship strongly criticized religious practices and the caste system. The villagers in the study area have cultural-religious practices that help them cope with deviant forms of mediumship - patterns such...
Medical Anthropology
2016
Wenyi Zhang
Healing rituals can be understood in terms of configurations of two states of consciousness-a culturally elaborated everyday waking consciousness, and an enhanced and culturally elaborated state of consciousness. Two healing rituals performed by the ethnic Kachin in Southwest China differentiate these two states of consciousness in their theories of life and death. The first ritual, animal...
Medical Anthropology
2005
Murphy Halliburton
76 citations
Based on research among possessed and mentally ill patients and an examination of depictions of mental health issues in the popular media in the state of Kerala, India, this article examines apparent changes in the incidence and form of spirit possession and the proliferation of psychological idioms such as "tension" and "depression." These changes involve a decline in the incidence of...
Medical Anthropology
November 1, 1990
D Wiedman
Big Moon Peyotism was introduced in the 1880s to the Delaware, Osage and Quapaw of Northeast Oklahoma by John Wilson, a Delaware-Caddo from Southwest Oklahoma. This form of Peyotism and the Little Moon ritual developed by the Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche of Southwest Oklahoma formed the basis of the two major variations of this religion as practiced by Native Americans throughout North America....
Medical Anthropology
August 1, 1990
M L Lyon
18 citations
This paper concerns the notion of order and its role in the conceptualization of healing, and therefore its importance to healing itself. It proposes a model of healing in which order is central. The paper begins with an example drawn from Javanese mystical practices which are based upon the concept of the unity of the human and natural orders. The Javanese case provides a metaphor for an...
Medical Anthropology
1984
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
15 citations
This article examines the vidente, or seer phenomenon in the Peruvian Amazon city of Pucallpa, Peru, where fieldwork was conducted in 1977 and 1979. With the discovery of natural opiate-like substances in the body, called endorphins, researchers in the brain sciences were intrigued by man's ability to create his own opiate-like response to pain, ecstacy and stress. Paranormal phenomena, often...