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

Rice University Elias Bongmba, Rice University; Roxane Richter; Thomas Flowers

doi:10.5771/9781498523196

Summary

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.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2017
Copyright Year: 2017
ISBN-Print: 978-1-4985-2318-9
ISBN-Online: 978-1-4985-2319-6
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 148
Product Type: Monograph

1. Contents No access
2. List of Figures No access
3. Preface No access
4. Acknowledgments No access
1 History, Tradition, and Religion No access Pages 1 - 16
2 Gnani—Banished to Witches’ Village No access Pages 17 - 36
3 Medical Concepts of Disease and Interpretations of Illness No access Pages 37 - 68
4 Gnani—Etiology of Diseases and Disorders No access Pages 69 - 94
5 Pathologies of Prejudice in Social Mechanisms No access Pages 95 - 108
6 Facing Forward No access Pages 109 - 130
Appendix No access Pages 131 - 132
Bibliography No access Pages 133 - 142
Index No access Pages 143 - 146
About the Authors No access Pages 147 - 148