X-Rays, Spirits, and Witches: Understanding Health and Illness in Ethnographic Context

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Description

Based on primary research conducted in Tanzania over the last fifteen years, X-Rays, Spirits, and Witches, provides an ethnography specifically designed for use in medical anthropology classes. The text is organized around four key topics that are recurrent themes in medical anthropology across diverse settings: medical pluralism, illness narratives, embodied experiences of health and illness, and the multilayered ways that power dynamics influence healthcare. In addition to telling an engaging story of health, illness, and medical treatment as experienced in a real-world setting, the chapters link anthropological terms and concepts to specific events. Unobtrusive in-text definitions as well as a complementary glossary of terms help students recognize and employ the language of medical anthropology. Short pull-out boxes explore key concepts (such as the idea of the medical gaze) and highlight for further consideration issues which are of particular relevance in the medical anthropology classroom. Such pedagogical elements are designed to complement but not bog down the ethnographyenabling students to make better connections between real-world research and core textbook concepts.

Reviews

Murchisons carefully crafted monograph, based on extensive fieldwork in southeastern Tanzania, blends straight-forward writing and lucid ethnographic case studies with medical anthropologys conceptual legacy. This engaging work explains and applies terms such as medical pluralism, therapy management, therapeutic itinerary, embodiment, divination, narrative and more in paragraphs comprehensible to undergraduate students and scholars alike. Highly recommended. -- John M. Janzen, professor emeritus University of Kansas - Lawrence

Author Bio

Julian M. Murchison is head of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University. He has taught a wide range of courses, including Health & Illness, Ethnography of East Africa, and Ethnographic Research & Writing. He has conducted ethnographic research in Tanzania for more than fifteen years. He is the author of Ethnography Essentials (2009).