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

    Daria Trentini (Author)

    9781978806702

    Hardback, published 16 July 2021

    246 pages, 7 b-w images
    22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.458 kg

    "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."

    — Patricia Barker Lerch, Nova Religio

    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.

    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
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