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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Religion and medicine at the crossroads: a re-examination of the Southern Rhodesian influenza epidemic of 1918 |
Author: | Simmons, David |
Year: | 2009 |
Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
Volume: | 35 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 29-44 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Zimbabwe |
Subjects: | influenza epidemics attitudes missions African religions 1910-1919 |
External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070802685536 |
Abstract: | This article seeks to explore the nexus of religion and medicine in accounting for African and missionary responses to the 1918 influenza epidemic in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe). Africans' explanatory models drew on a much wider sphere - sacred, social and biological - than their missionary and colonial counterparts, and their experience of the affliction led to an epistemological rupture in these explanatory models, resulting in a crisis in faith. Missionaries' explanatory models derived primarily from biomedicine, but missionaries were highly strategic in emphasizing the sacred nature of the epidemic when it came to the possibility of African conversion. The ambivalence engendered by these competing explanatory frameworks (biomedical and African vernacular) would ultimately lead to a rejection of both in the form of anti-medical movements. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |