Overview
Innovatively brings together microbiology and Amerindian shamanic practice, with a view to interrogating both as equals
Intertwines biocultural and ethnohistorical approaches
Provides a fresh comparative exploration sure to be of interest to anthropologists, historians and social scientists of medicine, science, and biology
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- Medical Anthropology
- Cultural Anthropology
- Science and Technology Studies
- Shamanism
- Postcolonialism
- Amerindian shamans
- pre-Contact Amerindian medicine
- ethnomicrobiology
- microbiome
- Shamanic microscopy
- entoptic vision
- Entoptic microscopy
- Biosocial Ethnohistory of Syphilis
- Theory of Contagion
- Ontological Theory of Disease
About this book
Giraldo Herrera reclaims this knowledge and lays the fundaments for an ethnomicrobiology. It will appeal to anyone curious about shamanism and willing to take it seriously and to those enquiring about the microbiome, our relations with microbes and the long history behind them.
Reviews
“In this book, and related publications, he makes excellent use of a sweep of literature about Caribbean and Lowland South American Amerindians as well as about medicine, epidemiology, and biology.” (Graham Harvey, Body and Religion, Vol. 3 (1), 2019)
“The book impresses by the breadth of its scope, the diverse literature it builds on, and the innovative bridges it establishes with research areas that have often been off-putting to social anthropologists. The hypothesis it explores is bold and imaginative, and it most certainly adds a new voice to microbial anthropology.” (Germain Meuelemans, Anthropological Notebooks, Vol. 25 (1), 2019)
“Amerindian shamans were the original microbiologists. Training their eyes inwards, as microscopes on the body, they had already discovered what we now call bacteria, how they cause disease, how disease spreads by contagion and how it can be treated, long before Europeans caught up with them. In this ground-breaking study, Giraldo Herrera meticulously unravels the traffic of bacterial infections, microscopic investigations and mythic elaborations that have bound Old and New Worlds over the centuries since they first came into contact. The history of science and medicine will never be the same again.” (Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, Scotland)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings
Authors: César E. Giraldo Herrera
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71318-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-71317-5Published: 20 March 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-10041-4Published: 28 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-71318-2Published: 09 March 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 274
Topics: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Sociology of Culture, Medical Sociology, History of Science, Human Geography