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What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health, illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on long-term ethnography and locating the village in historical and global context, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to situate evangelical Christian understandings as shaping and being shaped by their context and, in the process, shaping individuals themselves. As people move from local to global subjects, health here stretches beyond being a matter of individual bodies and is connected to worldwide flows and networks, spirit entities, and expansive moral orders.
List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction PART I: VILLAGE, SPIRITS, AND MORAL ORDER Chapter 1. Trinidad village
Chapter 2. The material and other worlds
Chapter 3. Cosmological crafting and story-telling
PART II: DISORDER AND THE DEVIL Chapter 4. The body and health
Chapter 5. The Devil in the body
Chapter 6. Healing the body
Chapter 7. The body in the village and in the State
Chapter 8. The Devil is disorder
Conclusion: Job, justice and moral order
Appendix: Churches in the Village
References
Index
About the author
Rebecca Lynch is Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology at King's College London. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London and has undertaken ethnographic work in Trinidad and the UK. Among other areas she has published on different sociocultural, moral and biomedical constructions of the body, health and illness and has edited three books that seek to expand approaches to the body and health.
