"An automatic Bible in the brain": Trauma and prayer among Acholi Pentecostals in northern Uganda.

This article examines the role of prayers for traumatized survivors of war within a Pentecostal-charismatic community in post-conflict northern Uganda. It argues that becoming part of a church group and learning certain regimes of prayer can work toward symptom relief and recovery for people suffering from traumatic experiences. The study builds on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural northern Uganda, with extensive participant observation of religious practices and interviews with rural church congregants. The article attempts to show, through a single case narrative, how individual prayer practices are trained and learned and to identify features of prayer that may alter the individual experience of distress. Analytically, the article builds on Tanya Luhrmann's scholarship on prayer and applies this conceptual framework to a post-conflict context. The study expands on Luhrmann's concepts of prayer as an emotional technology in order to understand how psychiatric symptoms are managed within a Pentecostal-charismatic community. The article further argues that a conceptual focus on training of skills can contribute to debates on the universal versus particular characteristics of psychiatric expression and concepts of mind. This argument contributes to current debates on non-clinical ways of managing traumatic experiences and to debates about models of mind in different cultural settings.

Clinical Positioning Space: Residents' Clinical Experiences in the Outpatient Oncology Clinic.

In this article, we present a case study of residents' clinical experiences and communication in outpatient oncology consultations. We apply positioning theory, a dynamic alternative to role theory, to investigate how oncology residents and patients situate themselves as persons with rights and duties. Drawing from seven qualitative interviews and six days of observation, we investigate the residents' social positioning and their conversations with patients or supervisors. Our focus is on how (a) relational shifts in authority depend on each situation and its participants; (b) storylines establish acts and positions and narratively frame what participants can expect from a medical consultation viewed as a social episode; and (c) the positioning of rights and duties can lead to misunderstandings and frustrations. We conclude that residents and patients locate themselves in outpatient conversations as participants who jointly produce and are produced by patients' and nurses' storylines about who should take responsibility for treatment.