The healing arts of body painting: lessons learnt from medical anthropology

Journal article

During my undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, I took an option paper in Medical Anthropology. Later, while I was excavating in Sudan and then working for an NGO in South Africa, I often recalled aspects of the medical anthropology course. I decided to return to Oxford in 2007 to begin the MSc in Medical Anthropology. My travels in Sudan inspired me to write my MSc dissertation on the healing qualities of Nuba body painting. Based on this project I received an AHRC grant, and I began my DPhil. My thesis, entitled ‘Beyond the Social Skin: Healing Arts and Sacred Clays among the Mun (Mursi) of Southwest Ethiopia', is a unique medical ethnography of body painting. Medical anthropology not only caused me to ask if body painting was medicinal, it also provided me with the theoretical background to explain how it has become the keystone of local Mun medical culture.

Authors: Fayers-Kerr, KN

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 270-285
• Publication date: 2015-01-01
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jxqooqb5b
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: JASO