Thesiss

This study isolates a set of ideas from the large corpus of information on possession and unmāda in Indian literature and culture. I trace the history of the concept of unmāda from the Āyurvedic texts (ca. 3rd–7th centuries C.E.), where it is an undesirable condition, to the lat…

This dissertation offers a study of religious values with regard to how religious tradition is maintained when in conflict with social convention. Specifically, it concerns how Christian exorcism overcame stigmas of magic and superstition as it extended into Greek and Roman area…

This phenomenological ethnographic study aims to review different exorcism cases and the afflicted individual’s account, looking to disentangle the phenomenon from the labels it has attracted throughout history, such as psychiatric illnesses and religious fanaticism. These cases…

This dissertation deals with practices of social categorization through the deployment of discourses of difference and morality in southern Yemen. It analyzes the ways in which this deployment is experienced as social domination and class inequalities in marginal social spaces. …