Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania PDF
Preview Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania
AfricA | Anthropology | public heAlth Bodies, Politics, T and African “Stacey A. Langwick leads This subtle and powerful ethnog- a her readers into the arena of raphy examines African healing and M Healing ‘ontological politics’ where its relationship to medical science. frictions among local medical Stacey A. Langwick investigates the experts are laid bare, and practices of healers in Tanzania who disputes about what is ‘real’ take confront the most intractable illnesses Stacey A. Langwick center stage. Her focus on the in the region, including AIDS and production and circulation of malaria. She reveals how healers therapeutic objects and their generate new therapies and shape the intimate association with the bodies of their patients as they address multiple ways that bodies devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft come to be objectified and medicine, and child immunization. subjectively experienced Transcending the dualisms between decenters assumptions tradition and science, culture and about truth and power in nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick the postcolonial era.” tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This —MArGAreT Lock, important work bridges postcolonial McGill University theory, science, public health, and anthropology. “Compelling and radical . . . stunningly intimate, STAcey A. LAnGwIck is Assistant deeply intellectual, and Professor in the Department of thoroughly political.” Anthropology at cornell University. —JULIe LIvInGSTon, She is a contributor to Borders and rutgers University Healers (IUP, 2006). INDIANA Front cover illustration: University Press George Lilanga, oil on hardboard, Bloomington & Indianapolis Usishangae sana sisi, wote ni iupress.indiana.edu familia moja (Don’t be shocked INDIANA 1-800-842-6796 by us, we are all one family). printer, I have some white panels here covering some of the drawn panels in black http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield a M f o r e T ia n a z n a T n i s ei d a l Bodies, Politics, and Langwick African Healing T e h Bodies, Politics, and African Healing http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield Bodies, Politics, and African Healing Te Matter of Maladies in Tanzania Stacey A. Langwick Indiana University Press • Bloomington and Indianapolis http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield Tis book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail For Yanini http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield Contents Acknowledgments ix A Note on Translation xv Prologue: AIDS, Rats, and Soldiers’ Belts 1 1 Orientations 7 Part 1. A Short Genealogy of Traditional Medicine 2 Witchcraf, Oracles, and Native Medicine 39 3 Making Tanzanian Traditional Medicine 58 Part 2. Hailing Traditional Experts 4 Healers and Teir Intimate Becomings 87 5 Traditional Birth Attendants as Institutional Evocations 121 Part 3. Healing Matters 6 Alternative Materialities 151 7 Interferences and Inclusions 175 8 Shifing Existences, or Being and Not-Being 207 Conclusion: Postcolonial Ontological Politics 232 Epilogue 240 Glossary 245 Notes 247 References 273 Index 291 http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield Acknowledgments Te gifs 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. Tese 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. Tis book can only be a partial thank you for this generosity. Her extended family welcomed me and infuenced 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 feldwork. Tis 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 ofen 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, Jam- bili Hamisi, Mzee Kalimaga, Muhamed Kasim, Mama Libongo, Samato Kiroya Maingo, Habiba Rashidi Mayaula, Mzee Mpende, and B. M. Nampyali. Further- more, I am profoundly grateful to the many patients as well as their families and friends who shared the stories of their afictions 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. Te seed of this book germinated as my doctoral dis- sertation. It is hard to imagine being able to live up to the generosity that Judith Farquhar has shown me since the frst day I walked into her ofce thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs. Her gifs to me go far beyond the keen analytical eye she brought to my work and the insistence on clarity and rigor that defned 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. Marga- ret Wiener consistently ofered her time and provided many careful readings http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield
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