Bodies, Politics, and African Healing

Stacey A. Langwick

Description

The therapeutic gap between traditional and modern medicine

This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.

Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation

Prologue: AIDS, Rats, and Soldiers' Belts
1. Orientations

Part 1. A Short Genealogy of Traditional Medicine
2. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Native Medicine
3. Making Tanzanian Traditional Medicine

Part 2. Hailing Traditional Experts
4. Healers and Their Intimate Becomings
5. Traditional Birth Attendants as Institutional Evocations

Part 3. Healing Matters
6. Alternative Materialities
7. Interferences and Inclusions
8. Shifting Existences, or Being and Not-Being

Conclusion: Postcolonial Ontological Politics
Epilogue

Glossary
Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Public Health
• Medical
• Médecine
• África
• Medicine
• Anthropology
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 23 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253001962
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Bodies, Politics, and African Healing

Bodies, Politics, and African Healing
The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania
Stacey A. Langwick
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2011 by Stacey A. Langwick
All rights reserved
Published with support from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Langwick, Stacey Ann.
Bodies, politics, and African healing : the matter of maladies in Tanzania / Stacey A. Langwick.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35527-0 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22245-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Traditional medicine-Tanzania. 2. Medical care-Tanzania. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Medicine, African Traditional-Tanzania. 2. Anthropology, Cultural-Tanzania. WB 55.A3]
GN477.L36 2011
398 .353-dc22
2010047853
1 2 3 4 5 16 15 14 13 12 11
For Yanini
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation
Prologue: AIDS, Rats, and Soldiers Belts
1 Orientations
Part 1. A Short Genealogy of Traditional Medicine
2 Witchcraft, Oracles, and Native Medicine
3 Making Tanzanian Traditional Medicine
Part 2. Hailing Traditional Experts
4 Healers and Their Intimate Becomings
5 Traditional Birth Attendants as Institutional Evocations
Part 3. Healing Matters
6 Alternative Materialities
7 Interferences and Inclusions
8 Shifting Existences, or Being and Not-Being
Conclusion: Postcolonial Ontological Politics
Epilogue
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
The gifts I have received and the debts I have accrued during the course of researching and writing this book are too great to capture in a few pages. Over the past decade, this book has been a medium for deep and intimate relations as well as brief but electric intellectual encounters. These have shaped who I am today not only as a scholar, but as a teacher, a spouse, a mother, and a person. My greatest debt remains to Binti Dadi and Mariamu whose friendship and kinship started in 1998 and who continue to be powerful daily presences in my life. Binti Dadi took a chance on me, shared her life, her medicines, her clients, her heart, and her home with me. This book can only be a partial thank you for this generosity. Her extended family welcomed me and influenced my research and this book. Mariamu, her youngest daughter, grew to be a dear and close friend. As an infant, Mariamu s daughter Yanini was a constant presence during my fieldwork. This family taught me a great deal about living, about kindness and trust, about laughter, and about survival. In addition they made this book possible and so I dedicate this work to Yanini as healing in this matrilineal area moves most often from maternal grandmother to granddaughter.
Many other healers shared their skills and visions with me as well. Although I cannot mention all of their names here, I would like to extend a special note of appreciation to Sheikh Awadhi, Fatu Chenga, F. M. Chinduli, Mzee Haleke, Jambili Hamisi, Mzee Kalimaga, Muhamed Kasim, Mama Libongo, Samato Kiroya Maingo, Habiba Rashidi Mayaula, Mzee Mpende, and B. M. Nampyali. Furthermore, I am profoundly grateful to the many patients as well as their families and friends who shared the stories of their afflictions with me and who welcomed me into the intimate processes of their cures (and sometimes their deaths).
During the course of my research and writing I have been blessed with some great academic teachers. The seed of this book germinated as my doctoral dissertation. It is hard to imagine being able to live up to the generosity that Judith Farquhar has shown me since the first day I walked into her office thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs. Her gifts to me go far beyond the keen analytical eye she brought to my work and the insistence on clarity and rigor that defined my graduate education. Over the years her faith in the power and humility of ethnography, in the import of writing, and the work of words that draw a reader into the pleasures, desires, beauty, and pain of others have inspired me. Margaret Wiener consistently offered her time and provided many careful readings and provocative comments about knowledge and magic. Catherine Lutz, David Newbury, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith each challenged me with useful questions and brought more depth to my arguments here.
Many other colleagues have also served as mentors and teachers over the years. I own Margaret Lock a special thank you. Among other things, Margaret s work taught me what it means to really listen and to capture individual stories of body, of health, of hope, and of healing. The questions she has put to me have opened my analyses to the histories of bodily materiality while she continued to insist on serious and rigorous consideration of scientific knowledge. In 1997, Steven Feierman answered a letter from an unknown graduate student who wanted to better understand the history and literature on African healing and medicine and he generously welcomed me to spend a semester studying with him. I continue to learn from Steve in every conversation I have with him. Each page of this book bears witness to the usefulness of Bruno Latour s provocative writings far beyond laboratory science. His early faith in my work and the possibilities of research in Africa shaped the direction of this book. Julie Livingston not only read an earlier version of this book, her careful review spurring important revisions, but she then also re-read pieces of this argument and spent hours on the phone and in various conferences helping me to make sense of the stories here. Even more than this, however, Julie and her work constantly remind me that research on embodiment is important insofar as it makes possible a powerfully empathetic scholarship, one that refigures the forms of difference that undergird modern global, class, gender, and race hierarchies and one that opens up the possibly for new sorts of solidarity.
This book was written both at the University of Florida and Cornell University. I was gifted with smart, sensitive colleagues at both institutions. Gwynn Kessler thought with me through issues of gender, politics, and writing as well as teaching and all the most important questions of life, family, and career. I hope many motorcycle rides are still in our future. The Center for African Studies at the University of Florida turned me into an Africanist. The enthusiasm and sense of intellectual community at the center under Leonardo Villal n s charismatic leadership was inspirational. The extended and rich conversations with Apollo Amoko, Brenda Chalfin, Hansjoerg Dilger, Abdoulaye Kane, Todd Leedy, Fiona McLaughlin, Sue O Brien, Renata Serra, Alioune Sow, and Luise White created an exciting place to work and think. Luise White also read this entire manuscript and gave me thoughtful and important feedback. Peter Malanchuk is the kind of librarian that all African Studies scholars dream of working with. His generosity extended to my time at Cornell. My graduate students at the University of Florida were exceptional interlocutors as well. I would specifically like to thank Traci Yoder for the hours she spent reading microfilm and Jennifer (Jai) Hale-Gallardo for her help copyediting and formatting the final version of this manuscript.
At Cornell I have been blessed with a supportive and intellectually stimulating department. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my Mellon writing group of 2008-2009 focused on the theme of De-centering Africa, which included Judith Byfield, Johanna Crane, Jeremy Foster, Sandra Greene, Dan Magaziner, and Dagmawi Woubshet. Their comments on an earlier version of the introduction of this book were immensely helpful as were Dominic Boyer s. Rachel Prentice read this manuscript, some parts more than once, and each time brought the sensitive way she thinks about the phenomenology of bodily care and knowledge to the text. Thank you all.
So many others have helped me think through pieces of this work in scholarly communities in the U.S. and abroad. Lisa Richey saw my interests unfold from the early days of my master s degree in public health. From Chapel Hill to Tanzania to our many meetings and bottles of wine in between, she has grappled with me over the most interesting and difficult issues of medicine and gender in Africa. I thank her in particular for invariably making me laugh in the situations when laughter was needed most. Tim Choy s friendship, intellectual solidarity, and always encouraging yet radical questioning not only deeply influenced this book but also were some of the greatest joys of writing it. Over the past decade he has read and re-read this book as well as many other articles and conference papers that I have written. I thank him for th