Thomas J. Csordas

A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing

The Sacred Self

Janis H. Jenkins

In this groundbreaking study based on five years of in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary research, Troubled in the Land of Enchantment explores the well-being of adolescents hospitalized for psychiatric care in New Mexico. Anthropologists Janis H. Jenkins and Thomas J. Csordas present a gripping picture of psychic distress, familial turmoil, and treatment under the regime of managed care that dominates the mental health care system. The authors make the case for the centrality of struggle in the lives of youth across an array of extraordinary conditions, characterized by personal anguish and structural violence. Critical to the analysis is the cultural phenomenology of existence disclosed through shifting narrative accounts by youth and their families as they grapple with psychiatric diagnosis, poverty, misogyny, and stigma in their trajectories through multiple forms of harm and sites of care. Jenkins and Csordas compellingly direct our attention to the conjunction of lived experience, institutional power, and the very possibility of having a life.

Adolescent Experience of Psychiatric Treatment

Troubled in the Land of Enchantment

William C. Olsen

Anthropologists have expressed wariness about the concept of evil even in discussions of morality and ethics, in part because the concept carries its own cultural baggage and theological implications in Euro-American societies. Addressing the problem of evil as a distinctly human phenomenon and a category of ethnographic analysis, this volume shows the usefulness of engaging evil as a descriptor of empirical reality where concepts such as violence, criminality, and hatred fall short of capturing the darkest side of human existence.

A Moral Anthropology

Engaging Evil

Alan Harwood

Csordas Thomas J.

A collection of essays examining the relationship between cultural values and the body as a source of symbols and instrument of experience.

The Existential Ground of Culture and Self

Embodiment and Experience

"This innovative collection examines the transnational movements, effects, and transformations of religion in the contemporary world, offering a fresh perspective on the interrelation between globalization and religion. Taken as a whole, Transnational Transcendence challenges some widely accepted ideas about this relationship, in particular, that international contemporary religious manifestations are secondary to the primary economic phenomenon of globalization."--P. [4] of cover.

Essays on Religion and Globalization

Transnational Transcendence

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement

Language, Charisma, and Creativity

How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas investigates the healing practices of a modern religious movement to provide a rich cultural analysis of the healing experience. This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the nature of self and self- transformation. Blending ethnographic data and detailed case studies, Csordas examines processes of sensory imagery, performative utterance, orientation, and embodiment. His book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory that will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing.

Thomas J. Csordas

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