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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.
Book
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
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
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
Working with spirit
In the current model of health dispensation in South Africa there are two major paradigms, the spirit-inspired tradition of izangoma sinyanga and biomedicine. These operate at best in parallel, but more often than not are at odds with one another. This book, based on the author’s personal experience as a practitioner of traditional African medicine, considers the effects of the absence of spirit in biomedicine on collaborative relationships. Given the unprecedented challenge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, the author suggests that more cooperation is vital. Taking a critical look at the role of anthropology in this endeavor, she proposes the development of a “language of spirit” by means of which the spirit-inspired aetiology of izangoma sinyanga may be made comprehensible to academic scientists and applicable to medical interventions. The author discusses white izangoma in the context of current debates on healing and hybridity and insists that there exists a powerful role for izangoma in the realm of societal healing. Above all, the book constitutes a start in what the author hopes will develop into an ongoing intellectual conversation between traditional African healing, academe, and biomedicine in South Africa.
eBook
Healing roots : anthropology in life and medicine
\"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.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
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