Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Spirit Possession, Disease Classification, and Emergent Infectious Disease in Benin, West Africa

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Graduate student James L Kennell, supervised by Dr. Carolyn F. Sargent, will undertake research on how disease classification systems operate within local biomedical, global health, and religious domains, and how they shape therapeutic behaviors and choices. This research will focus on variations in knowledge and therapy-seeking behavior concerning a particular set of infectious diseases that manifest on the skin. The goal is to illuminate the ways in which individual illness experience articulates with broader social processes. The research will be conducted among the Aja people of southwest Benin. The researcher will use a mixed-methods approach, including: participant observation, free listing and pile sorts, focus groups, direct observation, semi-structured interviews, text and content analysis, illness narratives and life histories, and informal interviews. Particular attention will be given to the Vodoun deity Sakpata, who is linked to the disease category of interest.The study focuses on interlocking systems of religious and medical knowledge and how individuals and communities attempt to make sense of change regarding health, suffering, and the world in which they live. The study will seek to understand how this particular population utilizes local religious and health care practices, such as medico-ritual healing and spirit possession, to create new meanings concerning infectious disease, and to formulate innovative responses to illness with respect to local political and biomedical dynamics and global health initiatives. Global health initiatives include vaccination and health education programs, the state organization of religious healers, the institutionalization of vodoun religion by the government, and external religious influences such as missionization and the international connections of vodoun religion. The research is important because it will contribute to medical anthropological theory regarding medical knowledge production and change. It also will support the education of a social scientist.