Publisher's Synopsis
The largest indigenous cult in Africa concerned primarly with women's complaints, the zar-bori cult extends from West Africa to the Sudan and North Africa and has spread into the middle east. Combining historical, anthropological and psychiatric insights, Women's Medicine presents an integrated study of this spirit-healing cult. In this first, comprehensive account, zar-bori's origins, spread and persistence and its importance in the lives of women, even in such 'modernised' settings as Egypt, Tunisia and the Gulf States, throws new light on the environments in which such subversive cults thrive. Previous studies have treated zar and bori as separate phenomena. This is the first work which shows how they are related and how they have developed over time and space.
