African American Folk Healing

Bibliographic Data

ID23510699
AuthorsStephanie Y Mitchem, Stephanie Mitchem
Year2022
Publication date2022-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueAfrican American Folk Healing (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherNew York University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.18574/nyu/9780814759622.001.0001
OpenAlexW4283383463
Open LibraryOL37384351M
ISBN9780814759622
LanguageEN
Citations received2

Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo. Stephanie Y. Mitchem presents a fascinating study of African American healing. She sheds light on a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations. She explores how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. Mitchem shows that these practices are not simply about healing; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.

Aesthetics · African american · Art · Ethnology · Faith · Faith healing · Psychotherapist · Quarter (Canadian coin) · Sociology · Traditional medicine · Variety (cybernetics) · History · Medicine · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · African americans · Folklore

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