Theories of Sickness and Misfortune among the Hadandowa Beja: Narratives As Points of Entry into Beja Cultural Knowledge

In a world constantly mourning the loss of unique cultures to the spread of homogenenaiety, the Muslim Beja of the Red Sea Hills in North-Eastern Africa have been able to maintain their culture through social, economic, and environmental changes. In his book Exploring Theories of Sickness and Misfortune, Frode F. Jacobsen argues that the telling of mythical narratives among the Beja is at least partly accountable for this remarkable persistence.

Specifically, Jacobsen's book explores the way in which Muslim Hadandowa Beja pastoralists of North-Eastern Africa reason about health, sickness, and misfortune. But the guiding question of the book--What must one know to understand a Beja personal or mythical narrative?--echoes the questions of social anthropologists everywhere. Through line-by-line analysis and examination of "implicit" knowledge within stories, this study of a people with an unusually rich and varied oral tradition becomes an archetype of the process of understanding the foreign while providing insight into the preservation of the familiar.