In this revised edition, the authors assess the psychological consequences of migration and prejudice for groups as diverse as West Indians, Turkish Cypriots and Hasidic Jews. Combining theoretical perspectives from the areas of psychiatry and social anthropology, they examine the epidemiology of mental ill health among ethnic minorities and black Britons, and conclude that mental illness can be an intelligible response to disadvantage and prejudice. The new concluding chapter to this standard text reviews the development of transcultural psychiatry in Britain and summarizes recent changes in...
In this revised edition, the authors assess the psychological consequences of migration and prejudice for groups as diverse as West Indians, Turkish C...
The Earth People of Trinidad draw on Yoruba sources to assert the particular power of female creativity. This first new Caribbean religion since Rastafari is led by a woman, Mother Earth, whose ideas emerged from her experience of a cerebral disease. The author, Roland Littlewood, who is both a psychiatrist and a social anthropologist, offers a nonreductionist view on the relationship between pathology and creativity, between the natural and the human sciences.
The Earth People of Trinidad draw on Yoruba sources to assert the particular power of female creativity. This first new Caribbean religion since Rasta...
Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality if not mental illness. Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, argues that it is necessary to take into account both social process and personal cultural meaning when explaining psychiatric illness and "deviant" behavior. Littlewood brings anthropological and psychiatric literature to bear on case studies of self-poisoning, agoraphobia, hysteria, chronic fatigue syndrome, post-traumatic stress, male sexual violence, and eating disorders. He...
Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality if not mental illne...
Social scientific studies of medicine typically assume that systems of medical knowledge are uniform and consistent. But while anthropologists have long rejected the notion that cultures are discrete, bounded, and rule-drive entities, medical anthropology has been slower to develop alternative approaches to understanding cultures of health. This provocative volume considers the theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic implications of the fact that medical knowledge is frequently dynamic, incoherent, and contradictory, and that and our understanding of it is necessarily incomplete and...
Social scientific studies of medicine typically assume that systems of medical knowledge are uniform and consistent. But while anthropologists have lo...
Social scientific studies of medicine typically assume that systems of medical knowledge are uniform and consistent. But while anthropologists have long rejected the notion that cultures are discrete, bounded, and rule-drive entities, medical anthropology has been slower to develop alternative approaches to understanding cultures of health. This provocative volume considers the theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic implications of the fact that medical knowledge is frequently dynamic, incoherent, and contradictory, and that and our understanding of it is necessarily incomplete and...
Social scientific studies of medicine typically assume that systems of medical knowledge are uniform and consistent. But while anthropologists have lo...
Professor Littlewood marshals arguments in an attempt to help the reader understand more clearly how humans interactively use religion and science/healing to come to terms with the world around them. He draws in part on his clinical work as a psychiatrist with patients from religious movements in the West, but primarily on his earlier anthropological fieldwork with a new African-Caribbean religion in Trinidad, and more recently with ethical transformations in the older Caribbean cults and among the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Hasidim. There exists a close relationship between the explanations of...
Professor Littlewood marshals arguments in an attempt to help the reader understand more clearly how humans interactively use religion and science/hea...
The Earth People of Trinidad draw on Yoruba sources to assert the particular power of female creativity. This first new Caribbean religion since Rastafari is led by a woman, Mother Earth, whose ideas emerged from her experience of a cerebral disease. The author, Roland Littlewood, who is both a psychiatrist and a social anthropologist, offers a nonreductionist view on the relationship between pathology and creativity, between the natural and the human sciences.
The Earth People of Trinidad draw on Yoruba sources to assert the particular power of female creativity. This first new Caribbean religion since Rasta...
The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the...
The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as pr...
This ground-breaking book contemplates how some religious individuals and communities conceptualise severe sadness and emotional distress, which might otherwise be described as pathological, as an essential ingredient for spiritual development. It explores the implications this may have for clergy and psychiatrists seeking to understand sadness.
This ground-breaking book contemplates how some religious individuals and communities conceptualise severe sadness and emotional distress, which might...
