scholarly journals Writing ‘naturecultures’ in Zulu Zionist healing

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rune Flikke
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Healing Rituals ◽  
African Independent Churches ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
Colonial Contact ◽  
Health And Well Being

<div>In this article my primary aim is to argue for an ontological and phenomenological approach to studying healing rituals within the African Independent Churches in South Africa. Through ethnographic evidence I will argue that the healing rituals are misrepresented in more traditional epistemologically tuned studies, and suggest that a better understanding is to be achieved through a focus on Latour’s ‘natures-cultures’ or Haraway’s ‘naturecultures’, thus showing how health and well-being are achieved through a creative process which continuously strive to break down any distinction of nature and culture as separate entities. I conclude by arguing that the contemporary healing rituals, which surfaced in South Africa in the mid eighteen-seventies, were a sensible and experience based reactions to the colonial contact zones of a racist Colonial regime dependent on African labor.</div>

scholarly journals Permeable Personhood and Techniques for Negotiating Boundaries of the Self among the Luangans of Indonesian Borneo

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabell Herrmans
Keyword(s):  
Human Health ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Healing Rituals ◽  
Health And Well Being

AbstractThis article explores the negotiation of permeable personhood and human health and well-being in the healing rituals (

Interpretation of Demonic Powers in Southern African Independent Churches

1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
George C. Oosthuizen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
African Population ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
African Independent Churches ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Indigenous Cosmology ◽  
The Church

African Independent Churches (AIC) have grown especially in South Africa at a tremendous pace—from thirty-two denominations in 1913 and hardly one percent of the African population to over three thousand denominations in 1980 and nearly 30 percent of the African population. Various reasons account for this tremendous growth such as several major emphases: Africanization of the church, socioeconomic deprivation, the adaptation process from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic world, and a holistic approach to healing which takes note of the indigenous cosmology. The latter aspect is a central issue. There are two types of diseases—natural, behind which are no malicious external forces, and those which are understood only within the context of African cosmology such as witchcraft, sorcery, ancestor wrath, spirit-possession. The missionaries ignored these forces and the problems Africans encountered with them. To these malicious forces the AIC give attention and their handling of them makes a decisive impact. This is the main theme of the article.

scholarly journals Democracy in crisis

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-81
Author(s):  
Lawrence Hamilton ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Health And Well Being

In this article I submit that the pandemic politics of the Covid-19 crisis have unmasked the inadequacies of existing representative democracies. Mixing the experiences and responses of various democracies and thinkers to this crisis, particularly from India and South Africa, I argue that a minimally functioning democracy must do two things at least: ensure the health and well-being of citizens and the equal means competitively to select prudent, empathetic and courageous leaders. For this, I suggest, we need a politics that allows us to express and assess our needs, and determine who is best placed to represent us in responding to these needs, all in non-dominating conditions. To this end, the article also proposes and defends four institutional reforms that would enable a dynamic, anti-oligarchic form of democracy to consistently empower the least powerful and keep elites properly in check.

scholarly journals Healing in a Cultural Context: The Role of Healing as a Defining Character in the Growth and Popular Faith of the Zion Christian Church

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kenokeno Mashabela
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Black Africans ◽  
African Independent Churches ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Needs

This article revisits the role healing has played in the growth of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) as one of the fastest growing African Independent Churches (AICs) in South Africa. The article argues that the ZCC is appealing to black Africans because it addresses healing within the cultural context of an African. Healing within the cultural context speaks to the fundamental needs of an African. The fundamental needs of an African see healing as addressing more than just a body ailment, but the totality of a person. The paper revisits the history of healing in the ZCC, and in so doing, will be a revisit to this church’s history. In revisiting this history, the discrimination that this church faced from the political authorities and from the white mission churches will also be referred to. 

scholarly journals A Pilot Study Assessing the Impact of a Fortified Supplementary Food on the Health and Well-Being of Crèche Children and Adult TB Patients in South Africa

PLoS ONE ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. e55544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Rudolph ◽  
Florian Kroll ◽  
Moira Beery ◽  
Edmore Marinda ◽  
Jean-Francois Sobiecki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Pilot Study ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Supplementary Food ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Health And Well Being

scholarly journals Cultural crossings of care: An appeal to the medical humanities

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Marie Rose Moro ◽  
John Ødemark ◽  
Eivind Engebretsen
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Concept Of Health ◽  
Health And Well Being ◽  
Insight Into

Modern medicine is confronted with cultural crossings in various forms. In facing these challenges, it is not enough to simply increase our insight into the cultural dimensions of health and well-being. We must, more radically, question the conventional distinction between the ‘objectivity of science’ and the ‘subjectivity of culture’. This obligation creates an urgent call for the medical humanities but also for a fundamental rethinking of their grounding assumptions.Julia Kristeva (JK) has problematised the biomedical concept of health through her reading of the anthropogony of Cura (Care), who according to the Roman myth created man out of a piece of clay. JK uses this fable as an allegory for the cultural distinction between health construed as a ‘definitive state’, which belongs to biological life (bios), and healing as a durative ‘process with twists and turns in time’ that characterises human living (zoe). A consequence of this demarcation is that biomedicine is in constant need of ‘repairing’ and bridging the gap between bios and zoe, nature and culture. Even in radical versions, the medical humanities are mostly reduced to such an instrument of repairment, seeing them as what we refer to as a soft, ‘subjective’ and cultural supplement to a stable body of ‘objective’, biomedical and scientific knowledge. In this article, we present a prolegomenon to a more radical programme for the medical humanities, which calls the conventional distinctions between the humanities and the natural sciences into question, acknowledges the pathological and healing powers of culture, and sees the body as a complex biocultural fact. A key element in such a project is the rethinking of the concept of ‘evidence’ in healthcare.

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