2016 Preview: Books Received at the Journal

First made available online last month, Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry has released its most recent lists of books received for review at the journal (which you can access on our publisher’s website at this link.) These books include Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger and Janis Jenkins’ Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness. Last year, we featured Caduff’s text (here) and Jenkin’s text (here) in book release features here on the blog.

The journal has also received the following two books for review. Here are the two releases:

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Image via UPenn Press website

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press is a collection of essays entitled Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice (available here.) Edited by Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick, with a foreword by Peter Piot, the book explores the experiences of health workers and other practitioners who deliver humanitarian medical aid throughout the world. The book promises a “critical” yet “compassionate” account of humanitarian projects spanning Indonesia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, and other nations.

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Image via Cornell UP website.

From Cornell University Press comes Gabriel Mendes’ Under the Strain of Color:
Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (available here.) This historical text examines a mental health clinic in the 1940s established to treat psychiatric complaints amongst a primarily black, urban, underserved population. Unlike other treatment centers for mental illness at the time, the Lafargue Clinic was unique in its emphasis on the medical as well as the social contexts in which its patients experienced distress. The clinic challenged existing notions of “color-blind” psychiatry and became both a scientific and equally political institution, highlighting the “interlocking relationships” between biomedicine, the state, racial inequity, and community-based health care.

AAA 2015 & New Initiatives at the CMP Blog

To our readers:

This week, many of you are attending the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Meeting in Denver, Colorado. From all of us at Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, we wish you safe travels to the conference and new knowledge and fresh insights upon your return.

Last year on the blog, the editorial staff took this week to thank our readers and to share with you the future directions of our social media in the coming year. We are grateful to all of our readers and followers for helping us foster an online community for medical anthropologists and our peers in allied disciplines, whether on our Facebook page, on our Twitter feed, or here at the blog. Thank you to all of our colleagues for sharing our posts, retweeting our links, and reading our features: from news updates, to conference postings, to book releases, and journal issue highlights.

In addition to these features, we are embarking upon two new initiatives on social media into 2016. The first is a new submission mechanism for book release updates on the blog. If you are an author of a new academic text in medical anthropology, social medicine, or medical humanities, let us know about your publication, and we will share it on the blog. We hope this new initiative allows us to showcase new and trending topics in the field, while it spreads the word about the research our readers and colleagues are carrying out across the globe.

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The second new initiative will include interviews with anthropologists, historians, and other scholars (including graduate students) about ongoing projects or newly published research. If you want to share your findings, introduce new theories or issues, or present new topics in the field, contact us to be interviewed. For both initiatives, please send requests and queries to our social media editor (Julia Knopes) at jcb193@case.edu. As always, books for review and academic articles can also be submitted to the journal proper. Please direct questions about journal submissions to managing editor Brandy Schillace at bls10@case.edu.

Lastly, we continue to accept guest blog submissions between 500-700 words in length on topics in medical anthropology, medical humanities, bioethics, and social medicine. Guest blog submissions may be submitted for review to our social media editor at the above listed address.

We look forward to sharing with you all of the changes and additions at CMP social media in the coming year.

Our best,

The Editorial Staff of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry

Book Release: “The Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State”

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Image via Oxford UP website

Out this November 2015 from Oxford University Press is an edited collection by William S. Sax and Helene Basu entitled The Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State. The text presents both contemporary and historical case studies of the relationship between spiritual conflict and judicial exchanges across cultures. While rituals to exorcise spirits from the afflicted are typically characterized solely as acts of healing, they are also scenarios in which spirit healers do justice by the possessed by driving out a spirit who has committed an act of evil against the person they inhabit. Spirit possession may similarly provide valuable opportunities for members of a community to contact restless spirits through a human oracle. These otherworldly entities may then offer evidence to the living as to how to avenge or appease them, thereby restoring social harmony. Healing, justice, cosmic order, and religion are thus closely integrated within these culturally meaningful negotiations.

The authors of the text challenge the assumption that these spiritual encounters– which have consequences for both medicine and the law in many societies– are antiquated and do not belong in modern societies or in secular governments. By drawing on examples from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, the authors assert that spiritual healing and law nevertheless persist in the contemporary age as a way to meet social and religious needs in many cultures.

Learn more about the book (in paperback) by clicking here.

Link to the hardcover copy: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-law-of-possession-9780190275747?cc=us&lang=en

About the editors: William Sax teaches at the University of Heidelberg, where he serves as the Chair of Cultural Anthropology at the South Asia Institute. Helene Basu is the director of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Münster University.

Publication Highlight: “Online First” Articles (Oct 2014), Part One

The following collection of articles are from our “Online First” file at our publisher’s website: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013. The full text of these articles will be released in upcoming issues of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, but here we’d like to lend our readers a glimpse into the innovative research in medical anthropology and social medicine that the journal publishes.

Clicking the title of each paper will send you to the “Online First” page for each article, including a full list of authors and abstracts.

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A Village Possessed by “Witches”: A Mixed-Methods Case–Control Study of Possession and Common Mental Disorders in Rural Nepal

Ram P. Sapkota, et al

Practicing and Resisting Constraint: Ethnography of “Counter Response” in American Adolescent Psychiatric Custody

Katherine Hejtmanek

The Invisibility of Informal Interpreting in Mental Health Care in South Africa: Notes Towards a Contextual Understanding

Leslie Swartz & Sanja Kilian

Learning Disabilities’ as a ‘Black Box’: On the Different Conceptions and Constructions of a Popular Clinical Entity in Israel

Ofer Katchergin