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Results for “Ceremonial Behavior”

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PubMed1991

Patients reporting ritual abuse in childhood: a clinical syndrome. Report of 37 cases.

Thirty-seven adult dissociative disorder patients who reported ritual abuse in childhood by satanic cults are described. Patients came from a variety of separate clinical settings and geographical locations and reported a number of similar abuses. The most frequently reported types of ritual abuse are outlined, and a clinical syndrome is presented which includes dissociative states with satanic overtones, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, survivor guilt, bizarre self abuse, unusual fears, sexualization of sadistic impulses, indoctrinated beliefs, and substance abuse. Questions relating to issues of reliability, credibility and verifiability are addressed in depth, and the findings and implications are discussed.

Abreaction↗
PubMed1994

Clinical correlates of alleged satanic abuse and less controversial sexual molestation.

Despite growing public interest and debate concerning satanic ritual abuse, few objective studies examine this controversial subject matter. To address this issue, measures of general psychopathology and dissociation were administered to patients alleging satanic ritual abuse and to patients alleging less controversial forms of sexual trauma. The subjects were women alleging a history of sexual abuse starting prior to the age of 12, involving penetration, and lasting for a period of at least 12 months. High but nondiscriminating levels of psychiatric pathology characterized both patient groups. Key differences were limited to dissociative symptomatology. Patients alleging satanic ritual abuse reported higher levels of dissociation, in the range often exhibited by patients with multiple personality disorders. The implications of the findings for SRA credibility are addressed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Psychological sequelae in adult females reporting childhood ritualistic abuse.

The present study sought to increase current scientific knowledge about the controversial issue of subjectively reported childhood ritualistic abuse by addressing several key unresolved issues. In particular, the possibility that those reporting ritualistic abuse may be characterized primarily by the severity of their abuse histories or the severity of their present psychological symptoms, rather than the veridicality of the ritualistic events, was explored. Adult female outpatients reporting childhood sexual abuse with ritualistic features were compared with a second group of women who reported childhood sexual abuse without ritualism. Measures included characteristics of childhood sexual and physical abuse, current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnostic status and symptom severity, and severity of current dissociative experiences. Women reporting ritualistic features scored significantly higher on measures of childhood sexual and physical abuse. Neither PTSD diagnostic status nor severity for PTSD nor dissociative experiences were significantly different between the groups. While preliminary in nature, these results suggest that it may be helpful to conceptualize reported childhood ritualistic abuse as indicative of the need to assess carefully for severe abuse and its predictable sequelae within existing traumatic victimization conceptual frameworks.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Anthropology and germ theory.

A small study of biomedical cultural influences which affect the implementation of infection control practice was undertaken. The study, between March and September 1992, was performed in a 10-bedded paediatric cardiac intensive care unit and a total parenteral nutrition (TPN) outpatient clinic in a paediatric hospital in London. An ethnographic approach incorporating participant observation of six ritualistic practices and semi-structured interviews from seven people experiencing hospital-acquired infection was undertaken. A phenomenological, analytical method was used in an attempt to give meaning to the experience and behaviour of nurses, doctors and parents. The study indicated that 'germ theory' did not equate to nursing or medical practice but that the culture of biomedicine may interfere with infection control knowledge which causes conflict of understanding.

Anthropology, Cultural↗
PubMed1983

Hierarchy and food in Nepalese healing rituals.

An analysis of food transactions in a Nepalese village provides an interpretation of the cultural place of illness within high caste Hindu traditions. In several realms of village social life, rules of food transfer simultaneously mark hierarchical relationships between people and symbolize an interdependency among them. In these contexts, food transactions stress the importance of preserving hierarchy, reinforcing interdependence, and thereby maintaining a social framework within which exchanges of goods and services can harmoniously take place. But in the realm of illness, food use and references to food suggest conflicts or breakdowns in these kinds of interdependent relationships and ordered exchanges. I suggest that there is a fundamental conflict in village society since the local concern with human interdependency is set in a milieu of a sharply perceived scarcity of valued resources. This conception that human beings are interdependent for access to scarce goods introduces an element of danger into the system of exchange and opens a potential for disharmony in social relations. A cultural recognition of this danger is again reflected in the use of food, specifically in illness ideology and curing rituals. In this examination, illness emerges as the culturally apprehended outcome of some inevitable conflicts in the village social order.

Ceremonial Behavior↗
PubMed1985

Menstruation as medicine.

Traditional healing rituals in many parts of the world seem to derive from a model of cyclical renewal provided in the first instance by menstruation. Health is seen as dependent upon a correct balance between polar opposite states such as 'heat' and 'cold','dryness' and 'wetness' etc. Nature seems to achieve such balance by alternating regularly between opposites such as night and day, wet season and dry. In this way, periodic 'death' (night, winter etc.) alternates with 'life'. The logic of healing rites is that humans, too, should be able to move through 'death' to 'new life' by keeping closely in tune with wider rhythms of renewal. It is argued here that ideally, women should achieve this by menstruating in synchrony with the moon, which periodically 'dies' and is 'reborn'. Failing this--runs the traditional logic--men themselves must learn to 'menstruate' in some symbolic sense in order to safeguard the rhythms of renewal.

Attitude to Death↗
PubMed1985

Women heal women: spirit possession and sexual segregation in a Muslim society.

Sexual segregation and sexual asymmetry are prominent features of Northern Sudanese society. Women's sexuality and fertility are powerful and polluting, carrying with them the danger of dishonor and needing to be controlled and directed to their 'proper' social ends by men. Men pay for their daughters' infibulation, retain the right to dispose of them in marriage, honour their wives after childbirth, and claim children of the union for their patriline. However, it is women who actually practice infibulation and who keep firmly within their hands all the ritual surrounding vital stages of their life cycle. Throughout, women symbolically assert the fundamental nature of their reproductive power. The healing cult of the zar fits into this symbolic system with its woman-centred, woman run curative ritual.

Ceremonial Behavior↗
PubMed1985

Polluting and healing among the Northern Yaka of Zaire.

The Northern Yaka of Zaire construct a meaningful world by reference to the human body. They understand the socio-cultural domain in terms of bodily exchanges such as ingestion and excretion, sexual processes or listening and speech. They perceive their bodies simultaneously as bounded entities and as meeting points between inner and outer, self and other, and so on. Pollution occurs in the ominous transition, or the closure of corporeal and/or socio-cultural boundaries. Healing rituals aim to integrate bodily and socio-cultural domains and to mediate boundaries and boundary-transition. Part 1 of this paper transforms Mary Douglas' social perspective into a subject-centred view of the symbolic dimensions of sexuality, of pollution, and of the main forms of healing among the Northern Yaka. Here 'pollution' (mbeembi) has to do with an ominous disturbance of the cultural body schema and of domestic boundaries. Part 2 focuses on the ideological relationship between gender, the 'transgression of sexual rights' (yidyaata), and reproduction.

Ceremonial Behavior↗
PubMed1988

The drum is the shaman, the spear guides his voice.

Kodi rituals of curing use anthropomorphized objects--the drum and the spear--as intermediaries to communicate with the spirits causing the affliction. The spear 'cuts through' to the cause of the illness at the divination, by guiding the arm and voice of the human diviner. The drum beaten during an all night ceremony has a more important role: a myth at the opening of the ceremony tells the drum's personal story or biography, which is identified with the suffering patient. In the course of the ceremony it travels on a shamanistic journey to the upperworld to seek the blessings of health and well-being. The myth of the drum's origin provides a narrative structure for the whole ritual, and defines the basis for its efficacy. The percussive sounds of the drum and gongs are said to make the patient feel better. A case study shows how 'ordered sound' is used to dissolve social tensions into a culturally structured pattern, so that consensus can be achieved in implicit accommodations in which neither party loses face. An older man's illness awakens guilty feelings among his younger relatives, whose thieving is believed to be responsible. The healing ritual creates the context for them to express contrition without confessing. Thus, although the rite re-establishes communication between persons and between the human and spirit worlds, it involves deception and silences as well as revelations. Through an analytic comment on social tensions, artistic illusions are used to overcome the airing of social differences. The healing rite is intended to restore a social consensus, produced by a combination of music, speech and actions, which allow signs to triumph over substance.

Ceremonial Behavior↗
PubMed1988

Severing the bonds of love: a case study in soul loss.

Karo Batak ceremonial curing practices in urban Indonesia take place in a disputed zone of acts and meanings, in which neither social nor cultural coherence can be presumed by the analyst. Examining the therapeutic efforts of an urban Karo spirit possession cult aimed at curing the soul loss suffered by a young man, the Christian son of one of the cult's premier spirit mediums, this paper questions the relevance of the 'integrative model' in such cases, and suggests an alternative approach, looking at the sets of social, cultural and interpersonal tensions that run through the cult's practices and which, at the same time, those practices seek to contain.

Adult↗