In her book, From Where Does the Bad Wind Blow: Spiritual Healing and Witchcraft in Lusaka, Zambia, Katerina Mildnerová attempts to deal with the phenomenon of spiritual healing and witchcraft within the field of indigenous medicine and African Independent Churches in the contemporary urban setting of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. The book is grounded in theoretical concepts of medical and symbolic anthropology; the study analyzes the syncretic character of medical culture and the so called “therapy shopping” phenomenon. The author draws on data from ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2009, lasting a total eleven months.

The structure of Mildnerová’s book, and each chapter, is rather eclectic. She analyses and interprets the rich corpus of empirical data from the emic perspective while focusing primarily on the micro-level. She is interested in exploring face-to-face social relations as well as social networks within relatively small groups such as household, family, neighborhoods, and church community that play an important role in the process of healing and witchcraft accusations as well as in the social construction of illness. The author focuses on the micro-level, studying everyday social life, and questions how human suffering caused by different kinds of afflictions is reflected in local witchcraft and healing discourse and how is it interpreted by social actors themselves and the society in which they live. She attempts to answer the questions: is individual suffering linked to tension and animosities within the family and society, and what are its psycho-physiological consequences?

Mildnerová’s book starts with a brief introduction; theoretical background, research aims and questions, and the methodology employed are outlined. Chapter 1, “Lusaka’s Socio-Urban Context,” gives a short history of the urban and demographic development of Lusaka city. It deals with the low-income settlements known as compounds and the city’s social structure depicted from the perspective of the main integrative components—ethnicity, kinship, and religion. Chapter 2, “Medical Culture in Lusaka,” explores the issue of health/illness from the perspective of medical anthropology. The author defines key notions such as “medical culture” and “medical pluralism.” Later she proceeds to the analysis of the phenomenon of therapy shopping.

Chapter 3, “The Figure of a Healer,” outlines different types of traditional healers and Christian healers operating in Lusaka in relation to their specific distinguishing features, strategies, and competitive behavior stimulated by a rapidly changing urban setting. Chapter 4, “Indigenous Spiritual Healing,” describes and interprets different methods of diagnosis, therapy, and prophylaxis used by traditional healers. The author closely investigates the process of divination through “magic mirrors” used by witch-finders, and analyzes the role of dreams.

Chapter 5, “Christian Spiritual Healing,” deals with Christian spiritual healing within the syncretic African Independent Church, in particular prophet-healing churches. The chapter aims to show what types of afflictions are most often treated in the church, and what the methods of diagnosis and therapy are. Chapter 6, “Spirit Possession,” is dedicated to spirit possession, which plays a crucial role in spiritual healing. After outlining a brief theoretical background, the author proceeds to the interpretation of spirit possession from the point of view of traditional medicine and prophet-healing churches by means of a comparative analysis.

Chapter 7, “Witchcraft,” as the most voluminous part of the book, focuses on the contemporary phenomenon of witchcraft. She aims to offer a comprehensive explanation of witchcraft from the point of view of theory, system, and practice (Augé 1982), while paying special attention to the symbolic conceptualization of witchcraft among Lusaka dwellers today. Since the author believes that a comprehensive approach to the study of witchcraft necessitates an in-depth examination of particular social events, roles, contexts, and relations, she analyzes eight different multi-episodic medical cases linked to witchcraft. The case studies are used to support some of the theoretical assumptions of recent anthropological discourse on witchcraft.

The last section of the book is aimed at four main questions: 1. How does the process of witchcraft accusation reflect problems in the social structure, and how does it enhance the normative system based on shared collective reciprocity? 2. What kind of social, political and economic problems does the current witchcraft symbolic imaginary reflect? 3. What are the specific conditions and circumstances in which witchcraft accusations appear? 4. How is witchcraft diagnosed and treated by local traditional healers?

Overall, the book pays special attention to the local conceptualization of health, illness and body, cultural aetiology, the social and cultural representation of spirit possession and witchcraft, and different types of healers and their diagnostic and therapeutic praxis. It gives the reader a symbolic interpretation on the level of theory, system, and practice, based on different case studies.

Work Cited

M. Augé. 1982. Génie du Paganisme. Paris: Gallimard.

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[Review length: 779 words • Review posted on October 11, 2016]