During my first visit to Ghana in 1998, I was involved in a research project that looked at possible co-operations between healers and psychiatric clinics. I stayed in the healing camp of Prophet Abbam II, who was known in the area to heal patients with mental health problems. My presence at his healing church attracted many visitors, who kindly brought …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
In Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: An Intimate Debt, Larisa Jašarević explores the mutual entanglement between the economy, living body and the good life in postsocialist and postwar Bosnia. Beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated, this ethnography is a key addition to scholarly literature on debt, moral economies, medical anthropology, and material bodies. We are pleased to …
Generosity is contagious. Inescapable, come to think of it. Insufferable, if in thinking it, some of us would like the bliss of a fresh start, a clean slate, the relief of stories, field-wise and otherwise, that end. The gift of reading & writing time that you have jointly expanded on the Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt…
Many years ago, when I read an early version of the text that would become the second chapter of Larisa Jašarević’s remarkable new book, I found myself mesmerized by its stunning, exquisite and at times, downright opulent attention to the details of everyday life in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia, a place-in-the-world that the author and I share in more ways …
Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market invites readers on a most provocative ethnographic journey, a journey that reveals how bodies fold out—pleasurably and painfully—into mundane affairs of money, goods, and gifts, into shared moments of care and compassion, strange suffering and suspicious trust. This ethnographic excursion shows also how conditions of economic precarity fold back onto bodily experience. Market …
At the very end of Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt, Larisa Jašarević makes an intriguing statement: “Over the course of my weekly visits in 2007, the queen would repeat to the audience of her patients: ‘I looked into her future and allowed her to write’” (p. 258). Coming at the conclusion of her sinuous, circuitous …