Curing Their Ills

Curing Their Ills
Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2013-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0745668941

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between European medicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vaughan's detailed examination of medical discourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa, and explores the conflict between its pretensions to scientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European 'Jungle Doctors', and on mission medicine. In exploring the representations of disease as well as medical practice, Curing their Ills makes a fascinating and original contribution to both medical history and the social history of Africa.

Missionary Encounters

Missionary Encounters
Author: Robert A. Bickers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136786163

Describes the exceptional wealth of missionary archives and the major contributions they can make not only to the study of the processes of Christian evangelism and Western imperialism but also their value in documenting and analysing the nature of Western encounters with indigenous societies.

The Colonizers' Idols

The Colonizers' Idols
Author: Christina Harker
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3161550668

In this work, Christina Harker deconstructs the prevailing treatment of the New Testament as anti-imperial by contextualizing both New Testament scholarship and the Galatian experience within imperialist discourses that survived the dissolution of conventional empires in the twentieth century. She critiques simplistic treatments of empire as post-imperial (that is, replicating patterns of imperialist ideology, albeit unwittingly). To solve the problem, a new interpretation of Galatians is proposed that reworks and complicates the portrait of the Galatians themselves, rather than Paul, within what then emerges as a diverse social world peopled by complex individuals with heterogeneous social and cultural identities. The author is thus able to show how New Testament scholars who rehabilitate the Bible and Paul as anti-empire perpetuate the same imperialist modes of interpretation they seek to repudiate.

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2
Author: John L. Comaroff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2009-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226114678

In the second of a proposed three-volume study, John and Jean Comaroff continue their exploration of colonial evangelism and modernity in South Africa. Moving beyond the opening moments of the encounter between the British Nonconformist missions and the Southern Tswana peoples, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume II, explores the complex transactions—both epic and ordinary—among the various dramatis personae along this colonial frontier. The Comaroffs trace many of the major themes of twentieth-century South African history back to these formative encounters. The relationship between the British evangelists and the Southern Tswana engendered complex exchanges of goods, signs, and cultural markers that shaped not only African existence but also bourgeois modernity "back home" in England. We see, in this volume, how the colonial attempt to "civilize" Africa set in motion a dialectical process that refashioned the everyday lives of all those drawn into its purview, creating hybrid cultural forms and potent global forces which persist in the postcolonial age. This fascinating study shows how the initiatives of the colonial missions collided with local traditions, giving rise to new cultural practices, new patterns of production and consumption, new senses of style and beauty, and new forms of class distinction and ethnicity. As noted by reviewers of the first volume, the Comaroffs have succeeded in providing a model for the study of colonial encounters. By insisting on its dialectical nature, they demonstrate that colonialism can no longer be seen as a one-sided relationship between the conquering and the conquered. It is, rather, a complex system of reciprocal determinations, one whose legacy is very much with us today.

Medical Marginality in South Asia

Medical Marginality in South Asia
Author: David Hardiman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136284028

Examining the world of popular healing in South Asia, this book looks at the way that it is marginalised by the state and medical establishment while at the same time being very important in the everyday lives of the poor. It describes and analyses a world of ‘subaltern therapeutics’ that both interacts with and resists state-sanctioned and elite forms of medical practice. The relationship is seen as both a historical as well as ongoing one. Focusing on those who exist and practice in the shadow of statist medicine, the book discusses the many ways in which they try to heal a range of maladies, and how they experience their marginality. The contributors also provide a history of such therapeutics, in the process challenging the widespread belief that such ‘traditional’ therapeutics are relatively static and unchanging. In focusing on these problems of transition, they open up one of the central concerns of subaltern historiography. This is an important contribution to the history of medicine and society, and subaltern and South Asian studies.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, Two Volume Set

The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, Two Volume Set
Author: Daniel Patte
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 1420
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532689438

The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity is an authoritative reference guide that enables students, their teachers, Christian clergy, and general readers alike to reflect critically upon all aspects of Christianity from its origins to the present day. Written by a team of 828 scholars and practitioners from around the world, the volume reflects the plurality of Christianity throughout its history. Key features of The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity: •Provides a survey of the history of Christianity in the world, on each continent, and in each nation •Offers a presentation of the Christian beliefs and practices of all major Christian traditions •Highlights the different understandings of Christian beliefs and practices in different historical, cultural, religious, denominational, and secular contexts •Includes entries on methodology and the plurality of approaches that are used in the study of Christianity •Respects each Christian tradition by providing self-presentations of Christianity in each country or Christian tradition •Includes clusters of entries on beliefs and practices, each examining the understanding of a given Christian belief or practice in different historical and contemporary contexts •Presents the relationship and interaction of Christianity with other religious traditions in the world •Provides, on a Web site (http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3906), a full bibliography covering all topics discussed in the signed articles of this volume