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At Ansha's
Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique
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Daria Trentini
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2021
About this book
At Ansha's takes the reader inside the spirit mosque of a female healer in Nampula, northern Mozambique. It is here that Ansha, a Makonde spirit healer, heals the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses pieces of her story of affliction and healing, and engages the world outside her mosque. We come to know Ansha’s experiences as revolutionary and migrant, her religious trajectories, family, the healers who cured her, the spirits who possessed her, and her declining health. We follow Ansha’s shifts in her life and work in the mosque as these intersect with the visible and invisible borders of Mozambique and of its fraught history. Confronting events in her life and in the mosque between 2009 and 2016, Ansha invites us to make meaning with her, as we sit in her mosque, and engage with her family, spirits, friends, patients, and world.
Author / Editor information
DARIA TRENTINI is an assistant professor of anthropology at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Reviews
"At Ansha's goes beyond the predicament of failing hospitals, and medical malpractice and misdiagnosis in post-war Mozambique. The ethnography elevates moments of radical care between Ansha and her husband Tiago, spells of (mis)fortune and of healing performances. Ansha's mosque is ambulant in its metaphysical dimensions. Constructed as a hut, and known for what it can do, the mosque offers responses to what biomedicine cannot see: ailments of the heart, suffering from absence, and uprootedness from one's people."
— Amina Alaoui Soulimani, Kronos"This vivid, richly woven ethnographic account of healing practice in Mozambique offers valuable insights into the fluidity and flexibility of cultural and religious boundaries. The book captures the dynamics of agency and power in its focus on a healer’s spiritual border-crossing, revealing alternative visions of experiences of culture and religion as continually re-constructed and emergent."
— Susan Rasmussen, author of Those Who Touch: Tuareg Medicine Women in Anthropological Perspective"Through this ethnographic account of one healer in northern Mozambique, Daria Trentini evokes the contours of an entire social world. As Ansha works the borders between health and illness, tradition and modernity, good and evil—even life and death—Trentini shows how lives are defined by tensions and contradictions as well as attempts to ease them. By providing such an accessible and compelling narrative, Trentini herself works ontological borders between her readers and those she meets in Ansha’s compound."
— Harry G. West, author of Ethnographic Sorcery"This ethnography is well written and offers much comparative material for medical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and the social science of medicine. I recommend it highly for both undergraduate and graduate students. Daria Trentini has made a very important contribution to the understanding of the personal and professional life and development of a spiritual healer."
Topics
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PART I: ANSHA AND THE SPIRITS
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PART II: OUTSIDE THE MOSQUE
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PART III: PATIENTS
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PART IV: RETURNS
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 16, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9781978806733
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
234
Other:
7 b-w images
eBook ISBN:
9781978806733
Keywords for this book
At Ansha's; spirit mosque; healer; Mozambique; religious; family; patients; ethnic studies; health; medicine; anthropology; Africa; Nampula; Makonde; culture; practices; medical anthropology; traditional; modern medicine
Audience(s) for this book
College/higher education;
