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Where dreams come alive : the alchemy of the African healer
\"This work explores the deep archetypal patterns embedded in the African healing initiation, the alchemical opus, and the individuation process through the work of C. G. Jung. The African healer subscribes to dreams the value and meaning that parallels the importance given to dreams in Jungian psychology. As such, this work focuses on the dream and alchemical symbolism within the stages of the African healing initiation, and documents the journey of a Zulu woman's heroic confrontation with her calling to be a healer. The main focus being striving towards wholeness or a transpersonal unity through the direct experience of the unintentional: The numinous \"other\" with respect to the autonomous reality of the objective psyche, the Self. Here we are offered a return, with consciousness, to the instincts, to an inner numinosity, to the phenomenon of psyche and matter, and spirit in nature. The author's direct and personal collaboration with various indigenous healing communities in South and Southern Africa, Namibia and Botswana provides a rich backdrop to and foundation for her work. The meeting of two cultures in the therapeutic temenos and the ceremonial rituals of the African healing initiation provides the vessel for the transformation necessary for the emergence of something new and as yet largely unarticulated\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange
Beginning with the colonial era, Western biomedicine has radically transformed African medical beliefs and practices. Conversely, in using Western biomedicine, Africans have also transformed it.The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchangecontends that contemporary African medical systems-no less \"biomedical\" than Western medicine-in fact greatly enrich and expand the notion of biomedicine, reframing it as a global cultural form deployed across global networks of cultural exchange.The book analyzes biomedicine as a complex and dynamic sociocultural form, the conceptual premises of which make it necessarily subject to ongoing change and development as it travels the globe. David Baronov captures the complexities of this cultural exchange by using world-systems analysis in a way that places global cultural processes on equal footing with political and economic processes. In doing so, he both allows the story of Africa's transformation of \"Western\" biomedicine to be told and offers new insights into the capitalist world system.
eBook
Traces of the future : an archaeology of medical science in Africa
This book presents a close look at the vestiges of twentieth-century medical work at five key sites in Africa: Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, and Tanzania. The authors aim to understand the afterlife of scientific institutions and practices and the \"aftertime\" of scientific modernity and its attendant visions of progress and transformation. Straightforward scholarly work is juxtaposed here with altogether more experimental approaches to fieldwork and analysis, including interview fragments; brief, reflective essays; and a rich photographic archive. The result is an unprecedented view of the lingering traces of medical science from Africa's past.
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Healing roots
Umhlonyane, also known as Artemisia afra, is one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. This bush, which grows wild throughout the sub-Saharan region, smells and tastes like “medicine,\" thus easily making its way into people's lives and becoming the choice of everyday healing for Xhosa healer-diviners and Rastafarian herbalists. This \"natural\" remedy has recently sparked curiosity as scientists search for new molecules against a tuberculosis pandemic while hoping to recognize indigenous medicine. Laplante follows umhlonyane on its trails and trials of becoming a biopharmaceutical — from the \"open air\" to controlled environments — learning from the plant and from the people who use it with hopes in healing.
eBook
Healing traditions : African medicine, cultural exchange, and competition in South Africa, 1820-1948
In August 2004, South Africa officially legalized the practice of traditional healers. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and limited both by the number of practitioners and by patients’ access to treatment, biomedical practitioners looked toward the country’s traditional healers as important agents in the development of medical education and treatment. This collaboration has not been easy. The two medical cultures embrace different ideas about the body and the origin of illness, but they do share a history of commercial and ideological competition and different relations to state power. Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 provides a long-overdue historical perspective to these interactions and an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa’s healthcare challenges. Between 1820 and 1948 traditional healers in Natal, South Africa, transformed themselves from politically powerful men and women who challenged colonial rule and law into successful entrepreneurs who competed for turf and patients with white biomedical doctors and pharmacists. To understand what is “traditional” about traditional medicine, Flint argues that we must consider the cultural actors not commonly associated with African therapeutics: white biomedical practitioners, Indian healers, and the implementing of white rule. Carefully crafted, well written, and powerfully argued, Flint’s analysis of the ways that indigenous medical knowledge and therapeutic practices were forged, contested, and transformed over two centuries is highly illuminating, as is her demonstration that many “traditional” practices changed over time. Her discussion of African and Indian medical encounters opens up a whole new way of thinking about the social basis of health and healing in South Africa. This important book will be core reading for classes and future scholarship on health and healing in South Africa.
eBook
Divining without Seeds
Infectious disease is the most common cause of illness and death in Africa, yet health practitioners routinely fail to identify causative microorganisms in most patients. As a result, patients often do not receive the right medicine in time to cure them promptly even when such medicine is available, outbreaks are larger and more devastating than they should be, and the impact of control interventions is difficult to measure. Wrong prescriptions and prolonged infections amount to needless costs for patients and for health systems. InDivining without Seeds, Iruka N. Okeke forcefully argues that laboratory diagnostics are essential to the effective practice of medicine in Africa.
The diversity of endemic life-threatening infections and limited public health resources in tropical Africa make the need for basic laboratory diagnostic support even more acute than in other parts of the world. This book gathers compelling case studies of inadequate diagnoses of diseases ranging from fevers-including malaria-to respiratory infections and sexually transmitted diseases. The inherited and widely prevalent health clinic model, which excludes or diminishes the hospital laboratory, is flawed, to often devastating effect. Fortunately, there are new technologies that make it possible to inexpensively implement testing at the primary care level.Divining without Seedsmakes clear that routine use of appropriate diagnostic support should be part of every drug delivery plan in Africa and that diagnostic development should be given high priority.
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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.
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