Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis

Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health

Roxane Richter; Thomas Flowers and Elias Bongmba

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.

Lexington Books

Pages: 168 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-2318-9 • Hardback • February 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-2320-2 • Paperback • February 2020 • $43.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-2319-6 • eBook • February 2017 • $41.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Political Science / World / African, Political Science / General, Political Science / Human Rights, Medical / History

Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis

Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

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.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 168 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-2318-9 • Hardback • February 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-2320-2 • Paperback • February 2020 • $43.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-2319-6 • eBook • February 2017 • $41.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Political Science / World / African, Political Science / General, Political Science / Human Rights, Medical / History

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

Reviews

This important interdisciplinary study sheds light on African witchcraft as an expression of gender-based and structural violence and human rights abuses. Bongmba, Flowers, and Richter succeed in illuminating processes of negotiation between Western medical and African religious discourses in rural regions in Ghana, and analyze the concept of “witchcraft” and its social dynamics, which discriminates against and excludes women from society. The book provides fundamental insights into the social dynamics of the belief in witchcraft and makes an important contribution to the history of African Religion, Medical History, and Sociology of Religion.

— Religious Studies Review