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In March 2009, in a small town in Malawi, a nurse at the local hospital was accused of teaching witchcraft to children. Amid swirling rumors, “Mrs. K.” tried to defend her reputation, but the community nevertheless grew increasingly hostile. The legal, social, and psychological trials that she endured in the struggle to clear her name left her life in shambles, and she died a few years later. In The Trials of Mrs. K., Adam Ashforth studies this and similar stories of witchcraft that continue to circulate in Malawi. At the heart of the book is Ashforth’s desire to understand how claims to truth, the pursuit of justice, and demands for security work in contemporary Africa, where stories of witchcraft can be terrifying. Guiding us through the history of legal customs and their interactions with the court of public opinion, Ashforth asks challenging questions about responsibility, occult forces, and the imperfect but vital mechanisms of law. A beautifully written and provocative book, The Trials of Mrs. K. will be an essential text for understanding what justice means in a fragile and dangerous world.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials. It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story -- the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.
This book addresses the biological, moral and legal issues which arising prenatal testing of late onset neurogenetic disease. The contributors focus specifically on Huntington's Disease, which is used as a model for other late onset neurogenetic diseases. The ethical and legal aspects of prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis are discussed with reference to case histories. This volume will provide valuable insights for all those involved in dealing with these challenging issues.
In a true story of a man bewitched, set against the turbulent backdrop of contemporary Soweto, Ashforth shows that witchcraft is not simply superstition but a complex response to spiritual insecurity in a troubling time of political and economic upheaval.
This book analyzes how over the last two decades, immigration regimes in three primary refugee-receiving states in the Global North – Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom – have engaged with allegations about witchcraft-driven violence made by asylum seekers coming from Anglophone countries across the African continent. The work intervenes at the nexus of anthropological, historical, legal, developmental, and human rights literatures to offer fresh insights into extrajudicial violence and global migration. Taking witchcraft-based asylum cases as its focal point, it argues that the recent dramatic expansion in claims to refugee protection under the ‘particular social group’ category of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention reflects immigration authorities’ increasing willingness to consider how legally recognizable persecution can derive from cultural practices and beliefs. Reflecting critically on such cases, it advances understandings of how witchcraft beliefs and practices have persisted as significant engines of violence in the contemporary world. It sheds light both on the limits of legal pluralism and cultural relativism in asylum adjudication and on how social scientific expertise contributes not simply to the flow of ideas, but also to the channelling of people across national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries. The book will be essential reading for students and researchers in legal anthropology, African studies, human rights, transnational history, migration and refugee law and policy, and the history and anthropology of witchcraft.
"Partial Stories takes readers to Malawi, where roughly one in twenty women can expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication, despite decades of safe-motherhood programs. The stories of these mothers are told in hospitals and villages, by chiefs and doctors, herbalists and nurses, epidemiologists and healers, and competing explanations proliferate. The mothers' stories are used by elders for technical education and moral instruction at a coming-of-age-ritual, a district hospital's mortality review, and in the reflected glow of a computer screen at an international conference. After orienting readers to urban Malawi's context of therapeutic pluralism and material scarcity, Claire Wendland discusses the ways various experts account for maternal death, showing how their diverse explanations reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. She looks to a series of pregnancy-related deaths in order to consider bodies as biosocial phenomena, shaped from before birth by history and social inequality. Wendland reveals an uneven therapeutic landscape that pushes experts to improvise, clinically and ethically. Their creative, essential, and sometimes deadly improvisations ask us to reconsider the "best practice" dogmas of global health and transnational research, as well as the nature of medical authority and expertise. Wendland demonstrates how strategies of legitimation render care more dangerous and knowledge more partial than it might otherwise be"--
Rethinking Aging