Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis

Traditional Ghanaian Beliefs and Global Health

Roxane Richter, Thomas Flowers, Elias Bongmba

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498523196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• History, Tradition, and Religion
• Gnani—Banished to Witches’ Village
• Medical Concepts of Disease and Interpretations of Illness
• Gnani—Etiology of Diseases and Disorders
• Pathologies of Prejudice in Social Mechanisms
• Facing Forward
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors