Book Recommendation:

[everydaypsyche]

Just here to recommend relevant folklore scholarship!

Erika Brady's - Healing Logics

A lot of the essays here examine ways that medical professionals can and should be more accommodating to alternative medical options especially in cross-cultural interactions (where communication problems and dismissal are more common). The essays are approachable and very informative.

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Barbara Walker's - Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural

In chapter six “Supernatural Experience, Folk Belief, and Spiritual Healing,” James McClenon discusses the lives of individuals whose shamanic healing can shed light on the basis of belief. He corroborates with David Hufford (another contributor), McClenon also delineates logical basis for spiritual healing showing that the spiritual healing (often via supernatural intervention) has a basis in reason where many skeptics would say it relies only on faith.

[RunningDeer]

Posted by everydaypsyche (here)
Just here to recommend relevant folklore scholarship!

Thank you, everydaypsyche. Welcome to Avalon.

pdf- Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems

Amazon Summary:

Scholars in folklore and anthropology are more directly involved in various aspects of medicine—such as medical education, clinical pastoral care, and negotiation of transcultural issues—than ever before. Old models of investigation that artificially isolated "folk medicine," "complementary and alternative medicine," and "biomedicine" as mutually exclusive have proven too limited in exploring the real-life complexities of health belief systems as they observably exist and are applied by contemporary Americans. Recent research strongly suggests that individuals construct their health belief systems from diverse sources of authority, including community and ethnic tradition, education, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, the influence of popular media, and perception of the goals and means of formal medicine. Healing Logics explores the diversity of these belief systems and how they interact—in competing, conflicting, and sometimes remarkably congruent ways. This book contains essays by leading scholars in the field and a comprehensive bibliography of folklore and medicine.

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pdf - Out of the Ordinary

Amazon Summary:

This contributed volume explores the functions of belief and supernatural experience within an array of cultures, as well as the stance of academe toward the study of belief and the supernatural. The essays in this volume call into question the idea that supernatural experience is extraordinary. Among the contributors are Shelley Adler, David Hufford, Barre Toelken, and Gillian Bennett.

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