The Myth of The Negro Past

The Myth of The Negro Past
Author: Melville Herskovits
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1990-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780807009055

Almost fifty years ago Melville Herskovits set out to debunk the myth that black Americans have no cultural past. Originally published in 1941, his unprecedented study of black history and culture recovered a rich African heritage in religious and secular life, the language and arts of the Americas.

Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia

Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia
Author: Anthony Cavender
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2014-07-25
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1469617390

In the first comprehensive exploration of the history and practice of folk medicine in the Appalachian region, Anthony Cavender melds folklore, medical anthropology, and Appalachian history and draws extensively on oral histories and archival sources from the nineteenth century to the present. He provides a complete tour of ailments and folk treatments organized by body systems, as well as information on medicinal plants, patent medicines, and magico-religious beliefs and practices. He investigates folk healers and their methods, profiling three living practitioners: an herbalist, a faith healer, and a Native American healer. The book also includes an appendix of botanicals and a glossary of folk medical terms. Demonstrating the ongoing interplay between mainstream scientific medicine and folk medicine, Cavender challenges the conventional view of southern Appalachia as an exceptional region isolated from outside contact. His thorough and accessible study reveals how Appalachian folk medicine encompasses such diverse and important influences as European and Native American culture and America's changing medical and health-care environment. In doing so, he offers a compelling representation of the cultural history of the region as seen through its health practices.

Working Cures

Working Cures
Author: Sharla M. Fett
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2002
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780807853788

Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.

Walkin' over Medicine

Walkin' over Medicine
Author: Loudell F. Snow
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1998-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814337619

A cultural look at the traditional health beliefs and practices of African Americans. Representing more than twenty years of anthropological research, Walkin' over Medicine, originally published by Westview Press in 1993, presents the results of Loudell F. Snow's community-based studies in Arizona and Michigan, work in two urban prenatal clinics, conversations and correspondence with traditional healers, and experience as a behavioral scientist in a pediatrics clinic. Snow also visited numerous pharmacies, grocery stores, and specialty shops in several major cities, accompanied families to church services, and attended weddings, baptisms, graduations, and funerals.

Conjuring Culture

Conjuring Culture
Author: Theophus H. Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1995-11-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0198023197

This book provides a sophisticated new interdisciplinary interpretation of the formulation and evolution of African American religion and culture. Theophus Smith argues for the central importance of "conjure"--a magical means of transforming reality--in black spirituality and culture. Smith shows that the Bible, the sacred text of Western civilization, has in fact functioned as a magical formulary for African Americans. Going back to slave religion, and continuing in black folk practice and literature to the present day, the Bible has provided African Americans with ritual prescriptions for prophetically re-envisioning, and thereby transforming, their history and culture. In effect the Bible is a "conjure book" for prescribing cures and curses, and for invoking extraordinary and Divine powers to effect changes in the conditions of human existence--and to bring about justice and freedom. Biblical themes, symbols, and figures like Moses, the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the Suffering Servant, as deployed by African Americans, have crucially formed and reformed not only black culture, but American society as a whole. Smith examines not only the religious and political uses of conjure, but its influence on black aesthetics, in music, drama, folklore, and literature. The concept of conjure, he shows, is at the heart of an indigenous and still vital spirituality, with exciting implications for reformulating the next generation of black studies and black theology. Even more broadly, Smith proposes, "conjuring culture" can function as a new paradigm for understanding Western religious and cultural phenomena generally.

Black Magic

Black Magic
Author: Yvonne P. Chireau
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2006-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520249887

Black Magic looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure—the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements—from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, Yvonne P. Chireau describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a beautifully written, richly detailed history that presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, Chireau shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, Chireau also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its groundbreaking analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, this book adds an important perspective to our understanding of the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.