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"Langwick, Stacey Ann"
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A POLITICS OF HABITABILITY
For Tanzanians, modern bodies bear complicated toxic loads not only because of the dumping of capitalism’s harmful by-products but also because of the social-material effects of efforts designed to address insecurity, poverty, and disease. Dawa lishe (nutritious medicine) is forged in this double bind. Producers of dawa lishe problematize toxicity as the condition under which life is attenuated, diminished, depleted, exhausted, or drained away. Therapies attend not only to individual bodies but also to relations among people, plants, and the soil. The efficacy of herbal remedies and of gardens full of therapeutic foods and nutritious herbs rests in the cultivation of the forms of strength that make places, times, and bodies livable again (and again). This essay examines how Tanzanians are laboring over, and reflecting on, the toxic and its relationship to remedy and memory through dawa lishe. In the process, it argues, they are redefining healing through a politics of habitability.
Journal Article
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing
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.
eBook
Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa
Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa--and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.
eBook
Devils and development
This is a study of the encounter between diverse therapies, forms of expertise, and medicinal substances in southeastern Tanzania. I argue that “traditional medicine” is less a phenomenon than a category of practice shaped through colonial and neo-colonial experiences. By comparing ways of assessing, protecting, and altering states of being, I illustrate what is at stake in the relationships between “modern” and “traditional” medicine. Maternal and child health has often been a site for efforts to distinguish “indigenous” healing from biomedicine and to develop a national Traditional Medicine in Tanzania. Therefore, I examine therapies routinely relied on by women and young children. The dissertation focuses on understanding what is gained and what is lost through scientific and public health efforts to translate knowledge and concepts from one idiom of care, and from one network of practices, to another. Demonstrating the materiality of knowledge, I investigate which objects are brought into existence through efforts to maintain well-being, and how these objects are translated into state-sanctioned programs to promote health. Through the details of practice, the complicated politics of these contemporary objects of therapeutic intervention and discussion are analyzed. I explore what is being translated, how these material translations happen, and who is most in control of the terms of these translations. The answers to these questions affect which treatments are considered viable options in a quest for therapy, and to some extent which medicines and expertise are available. I show that the efforts, effects, and implications of national and international health development programs cannot be understood as long as we neglect to account for the reconfiguration of objects and the material world such programs demand. Taking into account such objects of therapy, I argue that even as some non-biomedical healing practices may offer alternatives to the hegemonic discourse of health and development, the state is formulating a particular kind of modernity through the establishment of a Tanzanian Traditional Medicine. Tradition is being enlisted in the making of the nation through the everyday practices of addressing affliction.
Dissertation
Evidence, ethos and experiment
Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the “trial communities” produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.
eBook