Lärare: Lisen Dellenborg

Dokumentärfilm:

Living with the Invisibles (Vivre les Invisibles) [2003, 53 min]

This is an interesting documentary on the intersection between different health systems and what happens when people get sick from jinn (spirits) in Belgium. Film-maker Dirk Dumont teamed up with anthropologist Philip Hermans to explore how two Moroccan women living in Europe attempt to rid themselves of problems caused by jinn. The jinn, the “invisibles” of the film’s title, live alongside people and live their own parallel lives. However, some jinn can cause problems, attacking people and causing illness, mental distress, and numerous other kinds of suffering. In the film we follow the women as they seek assistance from traditional healers in both Europe and Morocco. Dealing as it does with the overlapping themes of immigration, religion, and medicine, this film is well suited for classes on any of those topics.

Vi diskuterar filmen i relation till nedanstående litteratur:

Moerman, D. E. (2013). Against the ”placebo effect”. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 21:125-130.

Van der Geest, S. (2005). ‘Sacraments’ in the Hospital: Exploring the Magic and Religion of Recovery. Anthropology & Medicine, 12(2):135–150.

Extra reading

(Byron Good’s paper is rather intricate reading; I have chosen it for those of you who are extra interested because of Good’s point that when anthropologists traditionally have said about people they study that “they believe in xx”, the anthropologists risk mis-representing peoples’ relation to xx; people might not believe in, for instance God, but know that God exist. Good points to the ethnocentrism in depicting the other as believing and themselves as knowing: “belief” is generally used in order to describe something that is uncertain or not true, in contrast to “knowledge”):

Good, B. (1994). Medical Anthropology and the Problem of Belief. I Byron J. Good. Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Pages: 7.-24.