Questioning Misfortune

Some of the most interesting new ethnographics of experience highlight the indeterminate nature of life. Questioning misfortune is very much within this tradition. Based on a long-term study of adversity and its social causes in Bunyole, eastern Uganda, it considers the way in which people deal with uncertainties of life, such as sickness, suffering, marital problems, failure, and death. Divination may identify causes of misfortune, ranging from ancestors and spirits to sorcerers. Sufferers and their families try out a variety of remedial measures, including pharmaceuticals, sorcery antidotes, and sacrifices. But remedies often fail, and doubt and uncertainty persist. Even the recent commercialization of biomedicine, and the peril of AIDS can be understood in terms of a pragmatics of uncertainty.

First sentence: Some thirty years ago, Clifford Geertz declared that the problem of suffering, as a religious problem, is how to suffer, not how to avoid suffering (Geertz 1967:19).

Year

1997

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

3

Pages

272

ISBN

9780521595582

Data source: Wikidata