Connecting-Africa | Find publications

Advanced search

Find:


Title Children enacting idioms of witchcraft and spirit possession as a response to trauma: therapeutically beneficial, and for whom?
Full text http://dare.uva.nl/record/469248
Date 2013
Author(s) Reis, R.
Abstract This article examines children's enactment of spirit possession idioms and witchcraft in Africa including the meanings such idioms provide and the local healing resources they mobilize. Idioms of haunting spirits in Northern Uganda and witch-children elsewhere in Africa can be interpreted as manifestations of social crises and mass traumatic stress. On the other hand, such idioms also allow children to articulate, reflect upon, and communicate the complex feelings resulting from their precarious positions within families and communities under duress. With the help of Dow's transactional model of symbolic healing, this article explores obstacles to the effectivity of the rich variety of symbolic healing available for haunting spirits in Uganda and points to the generational gap between children and their families and communities. Elsewhere, witchcraft idioms may act as a healing resource at the group level, but at the expense of the accused child. The idioms of evil spirits and witchcraft speak of these children's navigation of the moral universe of their postconflict communities. Given that children's appraisal of their experiences through these notions may also exacerbate their anxiety, interdisciplinary research examining the microprocesses that lead to children being haunted or accused, including emotional and physiological levels effects, is urgently needed.
Language en
Type of publication Article / Letter to the editor
Source Transcultural Psychiatry (13634615) vol.50 (2013) nr.5 p.622
Rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the copyright holder (usually the author), other then for strictly personal, individual use.
Repository Amsterdam - UvaPub, University of Amsterdam
Added to C-A: 2014-03-11;09:41:55