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Indigenous Religions and Disease Causation: From Spiritual Beings to Living Humans. By David Westerlund. Studies of Religion in Africa 28. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Pp. viii, 237. $99.00/euro76 paper. As a historian of religion, Westerlund aims to find a middle ground that combines the utility of locally based studies of religion with larger-scale attempts to understand religion more generally. In this case, his topic is African indigenous and he uses the lens of disease causation in order to compare five different systems. The premise of the book is an interesting one that is reminiscent of some of the great classics in the field of religions, while acknowledging the faults and limitations of those earlier studies. Westerlund's book is divided into an introduction and nine chapters, followed by an appendix. In the Introduction, he focuses a good deal on theories of religion and lays the foundation for his practical understanding of religion, which he traces back to Evans-Pritchard. Then, he proceeds to lay out his choice to examine five different cultural groups from the continent - San, Maasai, Sukuma, Kongo, and Yoruba- while repeatedly asserting the need to acknowledge the significant variety within each of these groups, especially when it comes to beliefs and practices as well as understandings of disease. Building on G. M. Foster's well-known distinction between personalistic and naturalistic disease etiologies, Westerlund proposes three ideal types of disease etiology that apply to indigenous religions: religious (suprahuman), social (human) and natural (mainly physical) (p. 6). In analyzing each of the five groups, he seeks to identify the role that different forces play in causing illness, focusing especially on the role of God, divinities, spirits, ancestors, and witchcraft/witchery. His analysis suggests that the foraging San and the pastoralist Maasai have traditionally demonstrated relatively little focus on social or human sources of disease. In contrast, Westerlund finds the social or human dimension of disease causation to be much more pronounced among the Sukuma, Kongo, and Yoruba. Westerlund points out that, among these groups, ancestors, spirits, and divinities traditionally were understood to be significant actors affecting health. Thus, his main analytical argument assumes, rather implicitly, a connection between forms and economic/subsistence systems. However, in what the subtitle suggests is a more central theme, a strong argument running throughout the text asserts that human agents may have become increasingly common disease agents as a result of the processes of modernization. According to Westerlund, the Kongo, Sukuma, and Yoruba have been most subject to these processes, but even the San and the Maasai have experienced the effects, primarily through contact with others and as a result of economic and political changes. …
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