num_pages: 257
description: In Milk, Honey, and Money, Christopher C. Taylor reveals how the image of the person is being re-created in Rwandan therapeutic practice. Placing the social construction of the sick body into its changing wider context, Taylor exposes the correlations between local healing and global political economy.In precolonial Rwandan culture, the body and the organization of the universe were thought of in terms of the flow and blockage of fluids. Operating in a "gift economy," the king and ritual specialists regulated these fluids--milk, honey, rain, blood--thereby ensuring the health of the people and the fertility of their land and cattle. Today, much of same imagery suffuses popular healing, and many sicknesses are depicted as perturbations in the flow of bodily humors. However, not all healers adhere to the precolonial symbolic forms.Identifying a primary image schema in Rwandan popular concepts of the body and cosmology, Milk, Honey, and Money explains how specifically Rwandan forms have been affected by the culture's capitalist transformation.
language: English
title: MILK HONEY MONEY
titlecomplete: MILK HONEY MONEY (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry)
ratings_count: 2
publisher: Smithsonian