Witchcraft In Ghana

Author : Mensah Adinkrah
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1782385614
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Witchcraft, Witches, and Violence in Ghana written by Mensah Adinkrah and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft violence is a feature of many contemporary African societies. In Ghana, belief in witchcraft and the malignant activities of putative witches is prevalent. Purported witches are blamed for all manner of adversities including inexplicable illnesses and untimely deaths. As in other historical periods and other societies, in contemporary Ghana, alleged witches are typically female, elderly, poor, and marginalized. Childhood socialization in homes and schools, exposure to mass media, and other institutional mechanisms ensure that witchcraft beliefs are transmitted across generations and entrenched over time. This book provides a detailed account of Ghanaian witchcraft beliefs and practices and their role in fueling violent attacks on alleged witches by aggrieved individuals and vigilante groups.

Author : Opoku Onyinah
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004397108
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Pentecostal Exorcism written by Opoku Onyinah and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Witchcraft" and exorcism have long been dominant features of life in African cultures. This unique book provides a thorough, field research-based description and analysis of a specifically Pentecostal Christian response to these phenomena within the Akan culture of Ghana. Anthropological studies generally claim that the ultimate goal of exorcism is modernisation. Using interdisciplinary studies with a theological focus, the author takes a different view, arguing that it is divinatory consultation or an inquiry into the sacred and the search for meaning that underlies the current "deliverance" ministry, where the focus is to identify and break down the so-called demonic forces by the power of God and to "deliver" people from their torment. The deliverance ministry is one attempt to contextualise the gospel for African people. However, preoccupation with demonisation and exorcistic practices is found to bring Christianity into tension with the Akan culture, family ties and other religions. In order to develop a properly safeguarded ministry of exorcism in an African context, the author examines contextualisation and suggests the integration into African Christianity of divinatory consultation, which has strong resonances with the biblical concept of prayer.

Author : Gabriel Bannerman-Richter
Publisher : Gabari Publishing Company
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Practice of Witchcraft in Ghana written by Gabriel Bannerman-Richter and published by Gabari Publishing Company. This book was released on 1982 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Mariano Pavanello
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1315439913
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Perspectives on African Witchcraft written by Mariano Pavanello and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethiopian and Eritrean Pentecostalism and the Habesha church in Rome -- Breaking with the past, healing history -- Conclusion -- References -- 7 "I went out into the street ... and now I am fighting for my life.": Street children, witchcraft accusations, and the collapse of the household in Bangui (Central African Republic) -- A history of oppression and dispossession -- The streets of Bangui -- Witchcraft violence:Children, adults and religious leaders in the streets of Bangui -- Etiological crisis and the collapse of the household -- Conclusion: The dialectic of enclosure and freedom -- References -- 8 Fields of experience: In between healing and harming. On conversation between Dogon healers and sorcerers -- Healing powers, sacrifice and sorcery on the Dogon plateau -- Archives of disorder, secret and rebellion -- To accuse, to heal, to envision -- Epistemological debris and 'hierarchies of credibility'. Conclusions -- References -- Index

Author : Roxane Richter
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498523196
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Witchcraft as a Social Diagnosis written by Roxane Richter and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Karen Palmer
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439143129
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Spellbound written by Karen Palmer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As I attempted to digest stories of spiritual cannibalism, of curses that could cost a student her eyesight or ignite the pages of the books she read, I knew I was not alone in my skepticism. And yet, when I caught sight of the waving arms of an industrious scarecrow, the hair on the back of my neck would stand on end. It was most palpable at night, this creepy feeling, when the moon stayed low to the horizon and the dust kicked up in the breeze, reaching out and pulling back with ghostly fingers. There was something to this place that could be felt but not seen. With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West Africa’s witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camp with an outsider’s sense of outrage, believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not explain: a woman who confessed she’d attacked a girl given to her as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of the witchcraft she believed helped her kill dozens of people. In Spellbound, Palmer brilliantly recounts the kaleidoscope of experiences that greeted her in the remote witch camps of northern Ghana, where more than 3,000 exiled women and men live in extreme poverty, many sentenced in a ceremony hinging on the death throes of a sacrificed chicken. As she ventured deeper into Ghana’s grasslands, Palmer found herself swinging between belief and disbelief. She was shown books that caught on fire for no reason and met diviners who accurately predicted the future. From the schoolteacher who believed Africa should use the power of its witches to gain wealth and prestige to the social worker who championed the rights of accused witches but also took his wife to a witch doctor, Palmer takes readers deep inside a shadowy layer of rural African society. As the sheen of the exotic wore off, Palmer saw the camp for what it was: a hidden colony of women forced to rely on food scraps from the weekly market. She witnessed the way witchcraft preyed on people’s fears and resentments. Witchcraft could be a comfort in times of distress, a way of explaining a crippling drought or the inexplicable loss of a child. It was a means of predicting the unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable. But witchcraft was also a tool for social control. In this vivid, startling work of first-person reportage, Palmer sheds light on the plight of women in a rarely seen corner of the world.

Author : Aaron Cohen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022665303X
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Move On Up written by Aaron Cohen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-09-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chicago Tribune Book of 2019, Notable Chicago Reads A Booklist Top 10 Arts Book of 2019 A No Depression Top Music Book of 2019 Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil.

Author : Norman N. Miller
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438443595
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Encounters with Witchcraft written by Norman N. Miller and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encounters with Witchcraft is a personal story of a young man's fascination with African witchcraft discovered first in a trek across East Africa and the Congo. The story unfolds over four decades during the author's long residence in and many trips to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. As a field researcher he learns from villagers what it is like to live with witches, and how witches are seen through African eyes. His teachers are healers, cult leaders, witch-hunters and self-proclaimed "witches" as well as policemen, politicians and judges. A key figure is Mohammadi Lupanda, a frail village woman whose only child has died years before. In her dreams, however, she believes the little girl is not dead, but only lost in the fields. Mohammadi is discovered wandering at night, wailing and calling out for the child. Her neighbors are terror-stricken and she is quickly brought to a village trial and banished as a witch. The author is able to watch and listen to the proceedings and later investigate the deeper story. He discovers mysteries about Mohammadi that are only solved when he returns to the village three decades later. Today, witch-hunting and witchcraft-related crimes are found in more than seventy developing countries. Epidemics of violence against alleged witches, mainly women, but including elders of both genders, and even children is on the increase in some parts of the world. Witchcraft beliefs may lie behind vigilante murders, political assassinations, revenge killings and commercial murders for human body parts. Through African voices the author addresses key questions. Do witchcraft powers exist? Why does witchcraft persist? What are its historic roots? Why is witchcraft-based violence so often found within families? Does witchcraft serve as a hidden legal and political system, a mafia-like under-government? The author holds up a mirror for us to think about religious beliefs in our own experience that rely heavily on myth and superstition.

Author : M Christian Green
Publisher : AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
ISBN 13 : 1928314422
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Religion, Law and Security in Africa written by M Christian Green and published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Security is a key topic of our time. But how do we understand it? Do law and religion take different views of it? In this fifth volume in the Law and Religion in Africa series, radicalisation, terrorism, blasphemy, hate speech, religious freedom and just war theories rub shoulders with issues of witchcraft, female genital mutilation circumcision, child marriage, displaced communities and additional issues besides. This unique collection of topics is both challenging and inspiring, providing illumination in troubled times, and forming a sound foundation for future scholarship.

Author : Sefa Awaworyi Churchill
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 9811523533
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Measuring, Understanding and Improving Wellbeing Among Older People written by Sefa Awaworyi Churchill and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we be happier, healthier and more satisfied in life? This edited collection examines various dimensions of wellbeing among older people, including its measurement; social, environmental and economic determinants; and how research can be translated into policy to improve quality of life for older people. With an increasingly ageing population across countries and an increasing population of older adults, there is growing interest in improving older people’s ability to live healthily and happily. With a focus on retirement and aged care, this book is important reading for those interested in Welfare Economics, Health Economics and Development.