We Have No Microbes Here: Healing Practices in a Turkish Black Sea Village (Carolina Academic Press Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series) ... Studies in Medical Anthropology Series)

This book is a part of the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology series.
Protecting the health of family members is one of the major responsibilities of women in the Turkish family. Studying women's changing roles from within a rural family, the author presents a complex network of social relations which incorporates both traditional healing methods such as bone-setting and the services of the nationally sponsored health clinic. Following a patient-centered ethnographic approach, the book reveals the community's construction of the "natural" caring of mothers, wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law. Muslim practice and Islamic revivalism; tradition and modernity; global, national and regional identity; and gender shape local concepts of health and illness. For example, a villager who does not believe that microbes cause illness may be flown to relatives in Germany for a surgical operation. Describing the verdant and rugged coast and the everyday life of the spirited individuals who inhabit it, this study examines the metaphors used to describe the body and its suffering--from birth to death--and places a small Black Sea village community in the global context of labor migration, religious trends, and medical technologies.