"This is the first comprehensive study of Samoan music. Cluny and La'avasa Macpherson have carried out intensive investigation into the practice and beliefs of contemporary indigenous healers, or fofố, in Western Samoa to produce a fascinating and throughful study. They explain convincingly why traditional Samoan medicine and its skilled practitioners continue to flourish alongside Western medical practice both in Samoa and in Samoan immigrant communities..."--Back cover.

This work deals with the medical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Egyptian, and Tibetan medicine, the book includes essays on comparing Chinese and western medicine and religion and medicine. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography.

Salvation and metabolism -- Ethnography between clinic and church -- Discerning ambiguous risks -- Freedom and health responsibility -- Embodied analytics -- Well-being and deferred agency -- Support synergies -- Integrating faith into healthcare practice.

The thoroughly updated Second Edition of Health Promotion in Multicultural Populations grounds readers in the understanding that health promotion programs in multicultural settings require an in-depth knowledge of the cultural group being targeted. Numerous advances and improvements in theory and practice in health promotion and disease prevention (HPDP) are presented. Editors Michael V Kline and Robert M Huff have expanded the book to include increased attention directed to students and instructors while also continuing to provide a handbook for practitioners in the field. This book combines the necessary pedagogical features of a textbook with the scholarship found in a traditional handbook. Several new chapters have been added early in the text to provide stronger foundations for understanding the five sections that follow. The book considers five specific multicultural groups: Hispanic/Latino, African American, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian American, and Pacific Islander populations. The first chapter in each of the five population group sections presents an overview devoted to understanding this special population from a variety of perspectives. The second chapter of each section explains how to assess, plan, implement, and evaluate health promotion programs for each of the specific groups. The third chapter in each section highlights a case study to emphasize points made in the overview and planning chapters. The fourth chapter in each section provides "Tips" for working with the cultural groups described in that section. New to the Second Edition Devotes a chapter to traditional health beliefs and traditions that can help the practitioner better understand how these beliefs and traditions can impact on Western biomedical practices Contains a new chapter that evaluates health disparities across the U.S. Presents a new chapter that examines ethical dilemmas and considerations in a multicultural context Offers updated citations and content throughout Gives selected Web sites of interest Intended Audience This book is ideal for practitioners and students in the fields of health promotion and education, public health, nursing, medicine, psychology, sociology, social work, physical therapy, radiology technology and other allied professions.

Medical practitioners and the ordinary citizen are becoming more aware that we need to understand cultural variation in medical belief and practice. The more we know how health and disease are managed in different cultures, the more we can recognize what is "culture bound" in our own medical belief and practice. The Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology is unique because it is the first reference work to describe the cultural practices relevant to health in the world's cultures and to provide an overview of important topics in medical anthropology. No other single reference work comes close to marching the depth and breadth of information on the varying cultural background of health and illness around the world. More than 100 experts - anthropologists and other social scientists - have contributed their firsthand experience of medical cultures from around the world.

This book explores the development of mental health systems in the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) of Samoa and Tonga through an examination of several policy transfer events from the colonial to the contemporary. Beginning in the 1990s, mental health became an area of global policy concern as reflected in concerted international organisation and bilateral aid and development agendas, most notably those of the World Bank, World Health Organization, and the governments of Australia and New Zealand. This book highlights how Tonga and Samoa both reformed their respective mental health systems during these years, after relatively long periods of stagnation. Using recent scholarship concerning public policy transfer, this book explains these policy outcomes and expands it to include consideration of the historical institutional dimensions evidenced by contemporary mental health systems. This book considers three distinct levels of policy implicated in mental health system transfer processes from developed to developing nations: colonial authority and influence; decolonisation processes; and the global development agenda surrounding health systems. In the process, the author argues that there are in fact three levels of policy change that must be accounted for in examining contemporary policy change. These policy levels include formal policy transfers, which tend to be prescriptive, involving professional problem construction and the designation of appropriate state apparatus for curative or custodial care provision; quasi-formal transfers, which tend to be aspirational and involve policy instruments developed through collaborative, participatory processes; and informal transfers that tend to be normative and include practices by professional actors in delivering service merged with traditional cultural beliefs as to disease aetiology as well as reflecting a deep understanding of the cultural context within which the services will be delivered. This book argues that a renewed focus on the importance of public policy and government institutional capacity is necessary to ensure human rights and justice are secured.

A new history of globalization and empire at the crossroads of the Pacific. Located halfway between HawaiÔi and Australia, the islands of Samoa have long been a center of Oceanian cultural and economic exchange. Accustomed to exercising agency in trade and diplomacy, Samoans found themselves enmeshed in a new form of globalization after missionaries and traders arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the great powers of Europe and America competed to bring Samoa into their orbits, Germany and the United States eventually agreed to divide the islands for their burgeoning colonial holdings. In Coconut Colonialism, Holger Droessler examines the Samoan response through the lives of its workers. Ordinary SamoansÑsome on large plantations, others on their own small holdingsÑpicked and processed coconuts and cocoa, tapped rubber trees, and built roads and ports that brought cash crops to Europe and North America. At the same time, Samoans redefined their own way of being in the worldÑwhat Droessler terms ÒOceanian globalityÓÑto challenge German and American visions of a global economy that in fact served only the needs of Western capitalism. Through cooperative farming, Samoans contested the exploitative wage-labor system introduced by colonial powers. The islanders also participated in ethnographic shows around the world, turning them into diplomatic missions and making friends with fellow colonized peoples. Samoans thereby found ways to press their own agendas and regain a degree of independence. Based on research in multiple languages and countries, Coconut Colonialism offers new insights into the global history of labor and empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

You don't have to be white to have a white mind. What is a white mind? As Anne Wilson Schaef learned during her travels throughout the world among Native Peoples, anyone raised in modern Western society or by Western culture can have a white mind. White minds are trapped in a closed system of thinking that sees life in black and white, either/or terms; they are hierarchical and mechanistic; they see nature as a force to be tamed and people as objects to be controlled with no regard for the future. This worldview is not shared by most Native Peoples, and in this provocative book, Anne Wilson Schaef shares the richness poured out to her by Native Americans, Aborigines, Africans, Maoris, and others. In the words of Native Peoples themselves, we come to understand Native ideas about our earth, spirituality, family, work, loneliness, and change. For in every area of our lives we have the capacity to transcend our white minds--we simply need to listen with open hearts and open minds to other voices, other perceptions, other cultures. Anne Wilson Schaef often heard Elders from a wide variety of Native Peoples say, "Our legends tell us that a time will come when our wisdom and way of living will be necessary to save the planet, and that time is now." Anyone ready to move from feeling separate to a profound sense of connectedness, from the personal to the global, will find the path in this mind-expanding, deeply spiritual book.

In the crowded and busy arena of obesity and fat studies, there is a lack of attention to the lived experiences of people, how and why they eat what they do, and how people in cross-cultural settings understand risk, health, and bodies. This volume addresses the lacuna by drawing on ethnographic methods and analytical emic explorations in order to consider the impact of cultural difference, embodiment, and local knowledge on understanding obesity. It is through this reconstruction of how obesity and fatness are studied and understood that a new discussion will be introduced and a new set of analytical explorations about obesity research and the effectiveness of obesity interventions will be established.