Chinese Magical Medicine (Asian Religions and Cultures)
Author: Michel Strickmann
This book argues that the most profound and far-reaching effects of Buddhism on Chinese culture occurred at the level of practice, specifically in religious rituals designed to cure people of disease, demonic possession, and bad luck. This practice would leave its most lasting imprint on the liturgical tradition of Taoism. In focusing on religious practice, it provides a corrective to traditional studies of Chinese religion, which overemphasize metaphysics and spirituality.
A basic concern with healing characterizes the entire gamut of religious expression in East Asia. By concentrating on the medieval development of Chinese therapeutic ritual, the author discovers the germinal core of many still-current rituals across the social and doctrinal frontiers of Buddhism and Taoism, as well as outside the Buddhist or Taoist fold.
The book is based on close readings of liturgies written in classical Chinese. The author describes and translates many of them, analyzes their structure, and seeks out nonliturgical sources to shed further light on the politics involved in specific performances. Unlike the few previous studies of related rituals, this book combines a scholar's understanding of the structure and goals of these rites with a healthy suspicion of the practitioners’ claims to uniqueness.
Booknews
This study of healing in the Taoist tradition examines how misdeeds and demonology cause illness per classic proto-Tantric and Buddhist texts. In completing this work of a late U. of California-Berkeley professor of Chinese religions, Faure (Asian religions, Stanford U.) added extensive reference materials. Illustrations include disease- curing seals. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Look this: Simple Asian Cookery or Create a Celebration
Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions
Author: Marcia Claire Inhorn
In Quest for Conception, Marcia C. Inhorn portrays the poignant struggles of poor, urban Egyptian women and their attempts to overcome infertility. The author draws upon fifteen months of fieldwork in urban Egypt to present moving stories of infertile Muslim women whose tumultuous medical pilgrimages -- or their "search for children," as they call their quests for conception -- have yet to produce the desired pregnancies. Inhorn examines the devastating impact of infertility on the lives of these women, who are threatened with divorce by their husbands, harassed by their husbands' families, and ostracized by neighbors.
Beliefs about procreation and infertility causation and cure among the Egyptian urban poor derive from a five-thousand-year history of shifting medical pluralism. Although colonially produced Western biomedicine is the dominant system in Egypt today, it represents only one of an array of therapeutic alternatives. Infertile women seek help from both "biogynecologists" (practitioners of Western biomedicine) and "ethnogynecologists" (practitioners of indigenous ethnomedicine), often using the remedies of both simultaneously. Quest for Conception examines in detail the variety of ethnomedical and biomedical treatments for infertility and concludes that treatments of both types are often ineffective and sometimes harmful. Given this untherapeutic setting, the future of infertile Egyptian women is explored in light of needed changes in reproductive health policy and the introduction of new reproductive technologies.
Quest for Conception is the first comprehensive account of non-Western women's experiences of infertility and is a novel study within the literature on Middle Eastern women.
Table of Contents:
| List of Illustrations | ||
| List of Abbreviations | ||
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Notes on Transliteration | ||
| Preface: Hind's Story | ||
| Pt. 1 | Problem, Place, and Procreative Theory | |
| Ch. 1 | The Infertility Problem in Egypt | 3 |
| Ch. 2 | Ancient Alexandria and Its Modern Poor | 39 |
| Ch. 3 | Past and Present in Theories of Procreation | 49 |
| Pt. 2 | Ethnogynecology | |
| Ch. 4 | Healers, Herbalists, and Holy Ones | 81 |
| Ch. 5 | Kabsa and Threatened Fertility | 111 |
| Ch. 6 | From Humidity to Sorcery | 158 |
| Ch. 7 | Divinity, Profanity, and Pilgrimage | 206 |
| Pt. 3 | Biogynecology | |
| Ch. 8 | Biomedical Bodies | 241 |
| Ch. 9 | Untherapeutic Therapeutics | 286 |
| Ch. 10 | The Injection of Spermatic Animals | 318 |
| Ch. 11 | Babies of the Tubes | 334 |
| Ch. 12 | Futures for the Infertile | 345 |
| Appendix 1. Fieldwork | 357 | |
| Appendix 2. Informants | 371 | |
| Notes | 379 | |
| Glossary of Arabic Terms | 395 | |
| References | 401 | |
| Index | 429 |
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