Powwowing among the Pennsylvania Dutch: A Traditional Medical Practice in the Modern World

David W. Kriebel is an anthropologist, and this Pennsylvania State University Press book is his modern ethnography of Braucherei, or powwowing, the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch folk medical practice, studying it as a living practice with active contemporary practitioners rather than as a historical survival. Its strength is that direct ethnographic fieldwork with current practitioners lets Kriebel describe how the practice actually functions today, correcting accounts that treat it as a curiosity of the past. Its limit is that it is focused specifically on the modern Pennsylvania Dutch context, so a claim about the practice's earlier German or colonial-era history needs a historically focused source in addition to this ethnography.