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At Ansha's

Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

Daria Trentini

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English
Rutgers University Press
16 July 2021
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.

By:  
Imprint:   Rutgers University Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 18mm
Weight:   4g
ISBN:   9781978806696
ISBN 10:   1978806698
Pages:   246
Publication Date:  
Recommended Age:   From 18 to 99 years
Audience:   College/higher education ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Primary ,  Primary
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
List of Illustrations Foreword by Lenore Manderson List of Abbreviations Ansha’s Family Note on Languages Prologue Introduction Part I: Ansha and the Spirits 1 Rural and Urban 2 Health and Healing 3 Wives and Husbands 4 Demons and Spirits 5 Insiders and Outsiders 6 Mountains 7 Coast 8 Rivers and Bridges Part II: Outside the Mosque 9 Makhuwa and Maka 10 Books and Roots 11 Muslims of the Spirits and Muslims of the Mosque 12 Healers and the Governo 13 Healers and Nurses 14 Knowing and Not-Knowing Part III: Patients 15 Good and Evil 16 Closed and Opened 17 The Dead and the Living 18 Juniors and Seniors 19 Tradition and Modernity 20 Spirits and Women Part IV: Returns 21 Life and Death Epilogue Acknowledgments Glossary Notes References Index

DARIA TRENTINI is an assistant professor of anthropology at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

Reviews for At Ansha's: Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

"""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."" — Patricia Barker Lerch, Nova Religio"


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