[So the confessionals speak!: Disease, gender and social class in the nineteenth century Seville]. / !So los confesonarios hablaran!: enfermedad, género y clase social en la Sevilla decimonónica.

María Juana Cañaveral Villena had suffered a disease which prevented her from using her legs for more than four years. In the evening 25th October 1872 she was anointed some fat and she was given to drink three sips of water, both of them previously passed by so-called perolito de san José. This provoked a total recovery. This fact is the beginning of a research work over different aspects of the Sevillian life of those days. This study gathers together among other things the response from the ecclesiastical authorities, the sociological characteristics of the two families involved in the event, the josephine movement as a form of popular religious manifestion, the controversy over the matter held by the theologian Mateos-Gago and the group of Seville rationalist physicians, the impact in the medical and no-medical literature, as well as, the attempts to explain the disease and the cure of doña María Juana.

Commodity fetichismo, the Holy Spirit, and the turn to Pentecostal and African Independent Churches in Central Mozambique.

Pentecostal and African Independent Churches have rapidly spread throughout central Mozambique in the aftermath of war and in the midst of a recent structural adjustment program that has hastened commoditization of community life and intensified local inequalities. This extraordinary expansion signals a shift away from reliance on "traditional" healers to treat persistent afflictions believed to have spiritual causes. Survey data and illness narratives collected from recent church recruits and local residents during research in 2002 and 2003 in the city of Chimoio reveal that healers have increased fees and tailored treatments to clients searching for good fortune in ways that have alienated many other help seekers in this changing social environment. While traditional healing has been celebrated in the international health world, community attitudes are less generous; many healers are increasingly viewed with suspicion because of their engagement with malevolent occult forces to foment social conflict, competition, and confrontation for high fees. Church healing approaches offer free and less divisive spiritual protection reinforced by social support in a new collectivity. One vital source of church popularity derives from pastors' efforts to tap the already considerable community anxiety over rising healer fees and their socially divisive treatments in an insecure environment.