Death in Abeyance : : Illness and Therapy among the Tabwa of Central Africa / / Christopher Davis.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Davis, Christopher,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2000
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: International African Library : IAL
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (342 p.)

This is a comprehensive survey, in both its theory and its practice, of the Tabwa who live on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of Congo (fomerly Zaire). The following topics are covered: concepts of the body and of illness, illness categories and approaches to diagnosis, divination and the meaning of illness in the life-histories of individuals and lineage groups. Moving to a broader perspective, it embraces therapies both of bodily events ('medicine') and of social circumstances ('magic' and 'religion'), and relates them to the cosmological beliefs which link and underwrite all three.Based on nearly four years of fieldwork, Dr Davis' book is the most complete study so far of an African therapeutic system. In contrast to most ethnographies of medicine, which take social structures as primary and treat medical knowledge as an extension or reflection of it, this study focuses on the medical system itself. When medicine is thus considered first as an indigenous or vernacular science, it is soon seen that much of what passes for an inderstanding of ritual, magic and religion in Africa is thin and misconceived.Death in Abeyance was awarded the 2002 Wellcome Medal (Royal Anthropological Institute).

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Maps, Tables and Figures -- Acknowledgements -- By way of an introduction -- PART I: The defile of the signifier -- 1 Dimensions of the Body -- 2 The Disorder of Things I: Diagnostic Categories and the Classification of Illness -- 3 The Disorder of Things II: Aetiology of Disease and the Process of Divination -- 4 The Defile of the Signifier: From Symptom to Life History -- PART II: Generation of identity, (re)production of history -- 5 Illness and Personal Identity: Kiabu's Case -- 6 Illness and Local History: Mwanga Village -- PART III: Intervening in the substantial real -- 7 Bodily Therapies -- 8 The Logic of a Substantial World -- 9 Events Objectified: Words into Things -- 10 Futures Realised: Events out of Things -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index