1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910814767103321

Autore

Mitchem Stephanie Y. <1950->

Titolo

African American folk healing / / Stephanie Y. Mitchem

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : New York University Press, c2007

ISBN

0-8147-9635-4

0-8147-5962-9

1-4356-0736-8

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (ix, 189 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

398.2089/96073

Soggetti

African Americans

African Americans - Medicine

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-186) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- Historical paths to healing  -- Stories and cures : defining African American folk healing  -- Healing, the Black body, and institutional medicine : contexts for crafting wellness -- Healing in place : from past to present -- Today's healing traditions -- Healing and hybridity in the twenty-first century -- Healing the past in the present -- Religion, spirituality, and African American folk healing -- Hoodoo, conjure, and folk healing -- Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo. Stephanie Y. Mitchem presents a fascinating study of African American healing. She sheds light on a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations. She explores how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. Mitchem



shows that these practices are not simply about healing; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.