Dissertation

Devils and development

Langwick, Stacey Ann

2001

Overview

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.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Cultural anthropology
• ISBN: 9780493445441, 0493445447