Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis: Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health

Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis: Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health

Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis: Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health

Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis: Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health

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Overview

This interdisciplinary manuscript examines one nonprofit’s five years of medical outreach in the condemned witches village of Gnani in Ghana, focusing on the clashes between traditional Ghanaian beliefs, African religious tenets, and contemporary Western medical science. The research draws upon 1,714 patient interventions and 95 personal interviews, exposing the inherent challenges of separating indigenous beliefs surrounding fate and witchcraft convictions from contemporary interpretations of biological pathogens, structural and gender-based violence, and evidence-based medicine.

This book offers a novel perspective on witchcraft as it examines questions of stigmatization in order to extrapolate how disease, injury, and illness relate to social condition and the dialogue surrounding witchcraft. These unprecedented insights will serve to uncover and explore rural Ghanaian challenges in gender-based violence, religion, legal and political tenets, human rights, and medical science and their many implications for those in search of health parity, social justice, gender equity, and human rights.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781498523202
Publisher: Lexington Books
Publication date: 02/07/2020
Pages: 168
Product dimensions: 5.98(w) x 8.85(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Roxane Richter is president of World Missions Possible.

Thomas Flowers is medical director of World Missions Possible.

Elias Kifon Bongmba is the Harry and Hazel Chair in Christian Theology and professor of religion at Rice University.

Table of Contents

1. History, Tradition, and Religion
2. Gnani – Banished to the Witches’ Village
3. Medical Concepts of Disease and Illness
4. Gnani – Etiology of Diseases and Disorders
5. Pathologies of Prejudice in Social Mechanisms
6. Facing Forward
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