Caribbean Healing Traditions

Caribbean Healing Traditions
Author: Patsy Sutherland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2013-07-24
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1136920587

As Caribbean communities become more international, clinicians and scholars must develop new paradigms for understanding treatment preferences and perceptions of illness. Despite evidence supporting the need for culturally appropriate care and the integration of traditional healing practices into conventional health and mental health care systems, it is unclear how such integration would function since little is known about the therapeutic interventions of Caribbean healing traditions. Caribbean Healing Traditions: Implications for Health and Mental Health fills this gap. Drawing on the knowledge of prominent clinicians, scholars, and researchers of the Caribbean and the diaspora, these healing traditions are explored in the context of health and mental health for the first time, making Caribbean Healing Traditions an invaluable resource for students, researchers, faculty, and practitioners in the fields of nursing, counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatry, social work, youth and community development, and medicine.

Cultural Constructions of Trauma and the Therapeutic Interventions of Caribbean Healing Traditions

Cultural Constructions of Trauma and the Therapeutic Interventions of Caribbean Healing Traditions
Author: Patsy T. Sutherland
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

The psychological literature indicates that integrating traditional healing practices into counselling and psychotherapy with Caribbean clients may address some of the mental health concerns of this population and the underutilization of mental health services. Traditional healing is often used in lieu of mental health services; however, the lack of knowledge of the precise therapeutic interventions and mechanisms of change that are key components to such integration limit its clinical utility. To address this gap in the literature, this study explored the specific ways in which Caribbean individuals conceptualize trauma and the therapeutic interventions of Caribbean healing traditions as a treatment modality. A constructivist grounded theory approach was implemented in the data collection and analysis. Ten adults of Caribbean heritage living in Toronto, who used the therapeutic interventions of Caribbean healing traditions, each participated in one semi-structured interview. Three overarching themes emerged from the data: experiencing trauma and suffering, explanations and meaning of trauma and suffering, and healing interventions. The study highlights the role of history and culture in shaping idioms of trauma, distress and healing, and contributes to both research and practice by offering a substantive framework for assessing, diagnosing and treating Caribbean clients, which may address the many challenges to mental health care for this population.

Obeah and Other Powers

Obeah and Other Powers
Author: Diana Paton
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2012-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822351331

This collection looks at Caribbean religious history from the late 18th century to the present including obeah, vodou, santeria, candomble, and brujeria. The contributors examine how these religions have been affected by many forces including colonialism, law, race, gender, class, state power, media represenation, and the academy.

Jamaican Folk Medicine

Jamaican Folk Medicine
Author: Arvilla Payne-Jackson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789766401238

This pioneering work is multi-disciplinary in approach as it examines the rich folk medicine of Jamaica. Payne-Jackson and Alleyne analyse the historical and linguistic aspects of folk medicine, based on their research, which included extensive fieldwork and interviews. They explore the sociological and ethnological dimensions of common healing and health-preserving practices which rely on Jamaica's rich biodiversity in medicinal and nutritional flora. As is the case with other aspects of Jamaican traditional culture, Jamaican folk medicine is largely misunderstood and subject to negative pejorative attitudes. This comprehensively study challenges some of the myths and misinformation. Particular attention is paid to cultural transference from Africa and the use of herbs in African-Jamaican religions. The work has an appendix and a glossary as well as a detailed bibliography.

The Experiential Caribbean

The Experiential Caribbean
Author: Pablo F. Gómez
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2017-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469630885

Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.

Healing Cultures

Healing Cultures
Author: NA NA
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2016-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113707647X

The Spanish expression - la cultura cura (culture heals) - is an affirmation of the potential healing power of a variety of cultural practices that together constitute the ethos of a people. What happens, however, when cultures themselves are in jeopardy? What are the "antidotes" or healing modalities for an ailing culture? Healing Cultures addresses these questions from a variety of disciplines - anthropology, holistic folk traditions, literature, film, cultural and religious studies - bringing together the broad range of beliefs and the spectrum of practices that have sustained the peoples and cultures of the Caribbean.

Creole Religions of the Caribbean

Creole Religions of the Caribbean
Author: Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2011-07-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814762573

A comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions developed in the Caribbean region Creolization—the coming together of diverse beliefs and practices to form new beliefs and practices—is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history. Brought together in the crucible of the sugar plantation, Caribbean peoples drew on the variants of Christianity brought by European colonizers, as well as on African religious and healing traditions and the remnants of Amerindian practices, to fashion new systems of belief. Creole Religions of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions that have developed in the region. From Vodou, Santería, Regla de Palo, the Abakuá Secret Society, and Obeah to Quimbois and Espiritismo, the volume traces the historical–cultural origins of the major Creole religions, as well as the newer traditions such as Pocomania and Rastafarianism. This second edition updates the scholarship on the religions themselves and also expands the regional considerations of the Diaspora to the U. S. Latino community who are influenced by Creole spiritual practices. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini–Gebert also take into account the increased significance of material culture—art, music, literature—and healing practices influenced by Creole religions.

Afro-Caribbean Religions

Afro-Caribbean Religions
Author: Nathaniel Samuel Murrell
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2010-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439901759

Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the largest African population in the world outside of Africa, and has historic ties to the Caribbean, Murrell includes a section on Candomble, Umbanda, Xango, and Batique. This accessibly written introduction to Afro-Caribbean religions examines the cultural traditions and transformations of all of the African-derived religions of the Caribbean along with their cosmology, beliefs, cultic structures, and ritual practices. Ideal for classroom use, Afro-Caribbean Religions also includes a glossary defining unfamiliar terms and identifying key figures.