In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy. What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective. Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.

A study how patients and practitioners transform ordinary clinical interchange into a story-line.

Working with children who have been physically or sexually abused presents tremendous challenges to therapists. Various therapeutic techniques can be used, such the medium of drama in the hands of psychodramatists and dramatherapists. There is comparatively little material available on the use of these techniques specifically with abused children.

This comprehensive book celebrates the coming of age of narrativein health care. It uses narrative to go beyond the patient's storyand address social, cultural, ethical, psychological,organizational and linguistic issues. This book has been written to help health professionals andsocial scientists to use narrative more effectively in theireveryday work and writing. The book is split into three, comprehensive sections;Narratives, Counter-narratives and Meta-narratives.

Healing Trauma in Group Settings offers a unique focus on the highly valuable role of attuned co-leader relationships in the practice of healing trauma. Drawing on their extensive experience of co-leadership, the authors demonstrate how to maximize the potential for effective trauma work while remaining attuned to the needs of individual group members and the group as a whole. With case studies, transcripts, and vignettes interwoven throughout, chapters suggest ways in which clinicians can model co-leader relationships as a means for developing a sense of interpersonal safety, exploring difficult material, and building opportunities for healing to take place. Demonstrating how concepts of attunement can be utilized in real-world settings, Healing Trauma in Group Settings enables mental health professionals to forge connections with clients while drawing on the potential of co-leadership in group therapy.

Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have been diagnosed with serious chronic medical conditions. Cheryl Mattingly proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as she explores case stories in this highly readable study. Depicting the multicultural urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, this theoretically innovative study illuminates communities of care that span both clinic and family and shows how hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances.