One Blood: The Jamaican Body

One Blood offers a wealth of ethnographic material, skillfully using traditional Jamaican images and expressions to present a coherent and systematic depiction of the Jamaican body, of how it works and of how health is maintained. Sobo explains some of the more complex issues of medical anthropology in a clear and accessible fashion and shows how gender and kinship tensions are expressed through culturally constructed syndromes. The book explores the ways in which the body serves as a medium for the expression of ideas about the social and moral order. Childhood socializations and ideas about gender relations, kinship, social obligations, sorcery, and deceit are investigated in association with beliefs about nutrition, procreation, sexuality, cleanliness, bodily flow, and sickness.