Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa

Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa
Author: Isak Arnold Niehaus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107016282

This biography casts new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between politics, witchcraft and AIDS in South Africa.

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa
Author: Adam Ashforth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2005-01-15
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780226029733

Large numbers of people in Soweto & other parts of South Africa live in fear of witchcraft, presenting complex & unique problems for the government. Adam Ashforth explores the challenge of occult violence & the spiritual insecurity that it engenders to democratic rule in South Africa.

Madumo, a Man Bewitched

Madumo, a Man Bewitched
Author: Adam Ashforth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2005-07-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780226029726

In a true story of a man bewitched, set against the turbulent backdrop of contemporary Soweto, Ashforth shows that witchcraft is not simply superstition but a complex response to spiritual insecurity in a troubling time of political and economic upheaval.

Encounters with Witchcraft

Encounters with Witchcraft
Author: Norman N. Miller
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438443595

Encounters with Witchcraft is a personal story of a young man's fascination with African witchcraft discovered first in a trek across East Africa and the Congo. The story unfolds over four decades during the author's long residence in and many trips to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. As a field researcher he learns from villagers what it is like to live with witches, and how witches are seen through African eyes. His teachers are healers, cult leaders, witch-hunters and self-proclaimed "witches" as well as policemen, politicians and judges. A key figure is Mohammadi Lupanda, a frail village woman whose only child has died years before. In her dreams, however, she believes the little girl is not dead, but only lost in the fields. Mohammadi is discovered wandering at night, wailing and calling out for the child. Her neighbors are terror-stricken and she is quickly brought to a village trial and banished as a witch. The author is able to watch and listen to the proceedings and later investigate the deeper story. He discovers mysteries about Mohammadi that are only solved when he returns to the village three decades later. Today, witch-hunting and witchcraft-related crimes are found in more than seventy developing countries. Epidemics of violence against alleged witches, mainly women, but including elders of both genders, and even children is on the increase in some parts of the world. Witchcraft beliefs may lie behind vigilante murders, political assassinations, revenge killings and commercial murders for human body parts. Through African voices the author addresses key questions. Do witchcraft powers exist? Why does witchcraft persist? What are its historic roots? Why is witchcraft-based violence so often found within families? Does witchcraft serve as a hidden legal and political system, a mafia-like under-government? The author holds up a mirror for us to think about religious beliefs in our own experience that rely heavily on myth and superstition.

Biomedical Hegemony and Democracy in South Africa

Biomedical Hegemony and Democracy in South Africa
Author: Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004436421

In Biomedical Hegemony and Democracy in South Africa Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta and Tabi Chama-James Tabenyang unpack the contentious South African government’s post-apartheid policy framework of the ‘‘return to tradition policy’’. The conjuncture between deep sociopolitical crises, witchcraft, the ravaging HIV/AIDS pandemic and the government’s initial reluctance to adopt antiretroviral therapy turned away desperate HIV/AIDS patients to traditional healers. Drawing on historical sources, policy documents and ethnographic interviews, Pemunta and Tabenyang convincingly demonstrate that despite biomedical hegemony, patients and members of their therapy-seeking group often shuttle between modern and traditional medicine, thereby making both systems of healthcare complementary rather than alternatives. They draw the attention of policy-makers to the need to be aware of ‘‘subaltern health narratives’’ in designing health policy.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2019-02-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1119251486

An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft
Author: Knut Rio
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2017-10-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319560689

This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia—where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.

Reimagining Social Medicine from the South

Reimagining Social Medicine from the South
Author: Abigail H. Neely
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2021-07-12
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1478021586

In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine's possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa. The PCHC's focus on medical and social factors of health yielded remarkable success. And yet South Africa's systemic racial inequality hindered health center work, and witchcraft illnesses challenged a program rooted in the sciences. To understand Pholela's successes and failures, Neely interrogates the “social” in social medicine. She makes clear that the social sciences the PCHC used failed to account for the roles that Pholela's residents and their environment played in the development and success of its program. At the same time, the PCHC's reliance on biomedicine prevented it from recognizing the impact on health of witchcraft illnesses and the social relationships from which they emerged. By rewriting the story of social medicine from Pholela, Neely challenges global health practitioners to recognize the multiple worlds and actors that shape health and healing in Africa and beyond.

White Witch Doctor

White Witch Doctor
Author: John A. Hunt
Publisher: Cumberland House
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781930754331

Dr. John Hunt has written a powerful true story of life and death, hope and despair in Apartheid South Africa. It details Dr. Hunt's fight to save his beloved country during a violent time of social unrest and political upheaval.

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa
Author: Ilana van Wyk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2014-05-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113991717X

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC), the UCKG insists that relationships with God be devoid of 'emotions', that socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity and fellowship are 'useless' in materialising God's blessings. Instead, the UCKG urges members to sacrifice large sums of money to God for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work, have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies, agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s.