Healing with Herbs and Rituals

Eliseo Torres spent over 25 years teaching curanderismo at the University of New Mexico — that depth of fieldwork comes through in a book that manages to be both academically credible and readable for non-specialists. The dual structure covering practitioners and herbs makes it genuinely useful, even if neither section goes deep enough to serve as a practitioner's manual. Readers approaching it as cultural anthropology will get real value; those in faith communities that view folk healing rituals as spiritually problematic should be aware of what is inside.