Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania available in Paperback, eBook
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania
- ISBN-10:
- 0253222451
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253222459
- Pub. Date:
- 06/23/2011
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253222451
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253222459
- Pub. Date:
- 06/23/2011
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253222459 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/23/2011 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing
The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania
By Stacey A. Langwick
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Stacey A. LangwickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35527-0
CHAPTER 1
Orientations
This book is a study of healing practices in southeastern Tanzania and the worlds they render meaningful and concrete. The World Health Organization (2002) estimates that 80 percent of Africans have sought out traditional medicine and states that many depend on herbal remedies as a critical aspect of their primary health care. Some African health professionals, including the district nursing officer in Newala, where I conducted the majority of the fieldwork for this book, suggest that the use of traditional medicine is on the rise due to the inadequacy of health care services under the growing economic pressures of neoliberal reform. The incorporation of traditional medicine and healers into health development goals raises the question of how to describe the efficacy of such therapies. This includes how to account for happenings that are salient to many therapeutic experiences but are discounted by biomedicine. Often the entities that healers claim to be treating—mischievous spirits, troublesome devils, disgruntled ancestors, the embodiments of human jealousies and greed—are not recognized by medical science, and the transformations that healers effect cannot be confirmed through biomedical procedures. Yet when Binti Dadi tests the toxicity of a new potential medicine on a rat and when Kalimaga keeps careful records of those who use his medicine in the name of "clinical trials," these healers refuse to observe the familiar boundaries between science and nonscience. Rather they reflect the ways that colonization, missionization, postcolonial state building, international development, and transnational capitalism have shaped the practices known as healing in Newala today.
In this book, I argue that the epistemological problem of postcolonial healing can be fully addressed only through a radical rethinking of the ontological ground of therapy. As healers in Tanzania strive to intervene in affliction, misfortune, and a range of undesirable states, they are crafting not only a new lexicon at the intersection of traditional and modern medicine but also new objects and entities toward which their care is directed—from enchanted parasites to biomedical devils. In so doing, healers in a rural district near the Tanzania-Mozambique border—an area known among staff of the regional hospital as a place "full of powerful witchcraft and traditional medicine"—offer innovative contributions to questions that lie at the heart of social theory and anthropology today: Who can assert which things legitimately constitute the world or, more specifically, the matter of the body and bodily threats? Which experts have the ability to generate new objects of care? Which entities have the right to exist in the postcolony? What sorts of politics are possible when we recognize the forms of power that legitimate some kinds of existence and not others?
My approach to these questions is shaped by the rich historical and anthropological studies that have offered nuanced understandings of therapeutic logics in Africa and the cosmological, symbolic, and social worlds that shape them. I am particularly inspired by careful studies that historicize phenomenological experiences of healing in Africa. I am also interested in the ways that experience and the specific forms of the experiencing subject emerge as effects of political, technological, ethical, and cultural relations over time. The objective of this book is, however, a little different. I strive to add to these studies by turning an eye to the ways the experiential is intimately entangled with the production of the objects and entities created in therapeutic practice—that is, to the matter(s) of African maladies.
Careful attention to healing practices in Tanzania complicates disciplinary trends that locate the study of bodily materiality in the natural sciences and the study of cultural meanings in the social sciences and humanities. Taking seriously healers' articulations of corporality, substance, palpability, and sentience means lifting the "critical immunity" often granted to biomedical materiality. Medical practitioners and social scientists often translate devils into parasites, see jealousies as a way of talking about social inequalities, and read angry ancestors as disturbances in the psyche. In so doing, their accounts fail to recognize the materiality of (so-called) traditional therapies and the objects of healers' therapeutic care. This investigation into the therapies of healers in southeastern Tanzania has been shaped by recent work in science studies that explores the coemergence of matters and meanings. The chapters that follow illustrate how the matter of the body and of bodily threats that are salient to contemporary therapies come into being through practice.
By exploring the semiological and praxiological nature of matter, science studies scholars have countered traditional philosophical representations of transcendent entities unmoored from their histories of becoming. Genealogies of "new" scientific and medical knowledge—which illustrate the temporal specificity of the objects and entities said to make up the world (and their significance)—have upset notions of ontology as a property of things. These histories of natural objects argue that ontologies are distributed through practices of knowing and intervening. This book is inspired by this focus on the practices through which the world is rendered explicit as it strives to articulate an analysis that is "true to objects that are at once real and historical" (Daston 2000). In Tanzania, any examination of ontological commitments in therapeutic practice requires attention to the material worlds both of and beyond science. Throughout this book, I linger over the times and places where the ambiguities and frictions of postcolonial healing practices hold open the possibility of rendering the world in different ways. It is in these in-between spaces that the stakes over which assertions count as knowledge, which substances count as objects, which people count as experts, and which threats deserve attention are most apparent.
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing strives to account for the kinds of being allowed to exist in the space and time of the postcolonial. It is, in short, an exploration of ontological politics. Ontological politics glosses the processes of making and unmaking—assembling and disassembling—the objects about which history is written and over which struggles are articulated. When taken up in reference to postcolonial healing, the analytical frame of ontological politics draws attention to the ways that particular remedies, bodies, and threats are brought to life, elaborated, propagated, destroyed, and allowed to fade away. These processes sit at the heart of the structures of governance, the strategies of popular resistance, and the techniques of subject formation that support transnational power.
Nowhere are the stakes over being and existence higher than in the arena of medicine and healing. Here the ways that the world is made explicit are immediately and intimately tied to questions of well-being, debility, and survival. And nowhere do the contemporary politics around medicine and healing appear starker than in Africa, where diseases thought to be manageable (if not curable) elsewhere kill millions each year. The "truth" of traditional maladies and the "fact" of traditional medicine is a risky negotiation about which practices, knowledges, institutions, experts, bodies, and threats will dwell in the world. It is not only about who and what has the ability to transform states of being; it is also about whose presence is licit, what is considered real, and which states of being matter.
The Social Basis of Healing Matters
While diverse therapies to address affliction and misfortune existed across Africa long before European explorers and missionaries traversed the continent, these therapies came to be seen as homogenous only in their opposition to biomedicine. First colonial prohibitions and later postcolonial developments elicited traditional medicine as a coherent category of knowledge and practice. Each passing wave of economic optimism has invigorated this modern category of traditional medicine. In the 1960s and 1970s, traditional medicine offered a solution to global inequities in wealth that had been deepened by Cold War divisions. Evoked as the basis of an indigenous pharmaceutical industry, traditional medicine promised to release African states from the devastating burden of supplying their expanding network of health services with foreign medicine that could be purchased only with hard currency. More recently, compelled by different desperations—in particular, those shaped by neoliberal restructuring and the insistence of international financial organizations that the poorest of countries produce their way out of poverty—traditional medicine has emerged as a new way into the global economy. Tanzanian officials are joining other African countries in a chorus that welcomes the commercialization of traditional medicine as a prospective path into the global market of herbal medicine, which the World Health Organization (2002) estimates to stand at USD 60 billion and growing.
Both early postindependence efforts to commodify medicinal plants and minerals as pharmaceuticals for a socialist health care system and later postsocialist efforts to (re)commodify medicinal plants and minerals as herbals have anchored knowledge of traditional medicine in laboratory investigation. The materialist claims of laboratory science hold that the substance of plants, animals, and minerals exist independent of local forms of social organization, ethics, and politics. This book, however, situates the substance of postcolonial therapeutic practices in a broader historical and political narrative. The contemporary healers I met in southeastern Tanzania are acutely aware of their relation to a modern notion of traditional medicine that is defined by medical science and health bureaucracies. They grapple with the fact that laboratory investigations into the medicinal value of plant, animal, and mineral substances draw distinctions between the natural and the social, make ahistorical assumptions about the boundaries between the material and immaterial, and invest in the separation of matter and spirit. Even as they become further entangled with modern science, healers remain unsympathetic to and are unconvinced by such clear divisions between the material and the metaphysical. Rather, through their work, they expand, transform, refigure, and offer diverse and sophisticated alternatives to national and international articulations of traditional medicine. They do this most profoundly through practices that render the therapeutic properties of plant, animal, and mineral substances scientifically explicit and articulate afflictions as spaces of intervention. For instance, as I discuss in later chapters, some forms of uchawi, or witchcraft, inhibit biomedical diagnostic technologies or block the efficacy of pharmaceuticals. By removing the blockage, healers' treatments allow hospital-based technologies and medicine to work, as in the case of treatments for malaria (see chapter 7). In these actions, which simultaneously acknowledge the biological body and challenge biomedicine's access to it, healers ground postcolonial healing in a politics of matter. Their treatments offer analytical leverage on biomedicine's claim to fundamental knowledge of the physical body. Healers' entanglements with medicine and medical science capture the tensions of postcoloniality as they reveal the stability of biological explanations (and the entities they entail) in an area that has seen over one hundred years of biomedicine and as they simultaneously generate innovative new ways of articulating the body and those things that threaten it. Postcolonial healing offers a dynamic space in which to investigate the continuities and discontinuities of imperialism and the life of other kinds of power.
The limits of language, especially in translation, have created challenges for those who write about postcolonial healing and attempt to capture the subtleties of complex subjects and objects whose genealogies lay claim to both scientific and nonscientific forms of medicine and whose matter is deeply physical and social, tied up in body and in kin. To keep my account open to multiple ways of knowing the world, I refer to the complaints and concerns of people in southern Tanzania who find themselves in undesirable, painful, and often debilitating states of being as "maladies" (as opposed to diseases, illnesses, or sickness). The English word "malady" resonates more strongly with the meanings and the connotations of the Kiswahili word ugonjwa than "disease" or "illness." Coming from the Latin male habitus, meaning "out of condition," derived from male (badly) and habitus (held, the past participle of habere, to hold), "malady" posits undesirable states as poorly executed acts. Being badly held suggests an unfortunate interaction with another, a relationship gone bad, an undesirable positioning. In Tanzania, a malady is a state of not being held well by the seen or the unseen world, by spirits or kin or neighbors, or in relation to other things in the world. According to Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, "malady" means not just "any sickness or disease; an illness," but also "moral defect or corruption." Even in its more recent configuration, then, this word does not force us to make the problematic separation between natural disease-causing entities and the social expression of illness. The concept of malady holds biomedical and nonbiomedical discomforts, disabilities, and other undesirable states of being in the same frame. The description of a malady traces the practices—of bad holding, violent encounters, unpleasant relationships—that constitute it, be they between viruses and immune systems or the "shadow" of a deceased older sibling and his newborn brother.
"Malady" references the ways that ontologies embed moral concerns as well as political power into the stuff of the world. By giving form to those things that threaten life and livelihood, healers frame narratives of accountability and legitimate regimes of obligation. For example, while living in Newala in the late 1990s, my neighbors' adult daughter returned home to her parents swollen and weak. Several years earlier, her husband had gone north to Tanga for work. After some time, he stopped returning to Newala and stopped sending money to support her and their children. Eventually, the news that he had married another woman made its way south. When my neighbors took their daughter to a healer, they learned she was debilitated by uchawi and that this husband must return to Newala to participate in (and pay for) an ngoma, a ritual healing ceremony that often lasts several days. He refused, and his wife died. The diagnosis of uchawi, the conversations it generated within the family, and the accusations against the distant husband not only pointed to the objects and workings of witchcraft but also wove together a narrative of accountability that included gender relations in southeastern Tanzania, the ethics of engaging in multiple marriages, and the politics of economic survival that necessitates that men travel far from home. The speculation that the wife might have had cancer did not dampen these other trajectories of blame or negate the forms of neglect that framed her death.
Tanzanians discuss, debate, and reconfigure the kinds of things that can be said to exist in the world as they address the maladies, debilities, and misfortunes they and their kin face. In the complexities of everyday life, that which constitutes the body and that which threatens its thriving are never certain. A friend exemplified this one day when he stopped by my home unexpectedly as he was traveling through the town where I lived. He was a Christian from the northern part of Tanzania who worked for a well-established international nongovernmental organization in the provincial capital and whose impressive résumé included fluency in Kichagga, Kiswahili, English, Cambodian, and Russian and work for the United Nations. He found my presence in a small town in southeastern Tanzania and my interest in healing provocative and amusing. Although we had had many conversations about my research in the past, he came that day with a specific articulation of his thoughts. Shortly after settling into a chair he announced that he "chose not to believe" in the power of traditional healers. He claimed that this lived belief did not rule out the possibility of witchcraft, devils, and invisible realms. In fact, for those who chose to engage such entities, he was fairly confident that relationships with them were possible. Rather, his refusal to believe was an explicitly Christian stance that he hoped would place him outside such relations in the predominantly Muslim southeast where he lived. Devaluing, indeed refusing to take part in, particular forms of individual and collective existence reveals the moral nature of worldly terrains.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bodies, Politics, and African Healing by Stacey A. Langwick. Copyright © 2011 Stacey A. Langwick. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsA Note on TranslationPrologue: AIDS, Rats, and Soldiers' Belts1. OrientationsPart 1. A Short Genealogy of Traditional Medicine2. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Native Medicine3. Making Tanzanian Traditional MedicinePart 2. Hailing Traditional Experts4. Healers and Their Intimate Becomings5. Traditional Birth Attendants as Institutional EvocationsPart 3. Healing Matters6. Alternative Materialities7. Interferences and Inclusions8. Shifting Existences, or Being and Not-BeingConclusion: Postcolonial Ontological PoliticsEpilogueGlossaryNotesReferencesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Anthropologist Langwick's fieldwork in the town of Newala in southeastern Tanzania started in 1998. Shortly after arriving, the author had the good fortune to establish an association with Binti Dadi, a Muslim woman healer, and Mzee Kalimaga, a Christian male healer. For ten months during the initial field stay in 1998-99, Langwick (Cornell) apprenticed with Binti Dadi, even being called 'Binti Dadi mdogo'—little Binti Dadi. She returned to Newala for a couple of months in 2002 and 2003. She carried out her research in KiSwahili and provides a short glossary that translates and clarifies key concepts. A brief prologue sets the scene for the body of the discussion, which covers such topics as witchcraft, oracles, and native medicine; making Tanzanian traditional medicine; healers and their intimate becomings; and traditional birth attendants as institutional evocations. Part 3, 'Healing Matters,' explores alternative materialities, interferences and inclusions, and shifting existences, or being and not-being. There is a short conclusion on postcolonial ontological politics and a brief epilogue incorporating Langwick's newly born daughter into this 'family.' Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty/professionals. — Choice"
Anthropologist Langwick's fieldwork in the town of Newala in southeastern Tanzania started in 1998. Shortly after arriving, the author had the good fortune to establish an association with Binti Dadi, a Muslim woman healer, and Mzee Kalimaga, a Christian male healer. For ten months during the initial field stay in 1998-99, Langwick (Cornell) apprenticed with Binti Dadi, even being called 'Binti Dadi mdogo'—little Binti Dadi. She returned to Newala for a couple of months in 2002 and 2003. She carried out her research in KiSwahili and provides a short glossary that translates and clarifies key concepts. A brief prologue sets the scene for the body of the discussion, which covers such topics as witchcraft, oracles, and native medicine; making Tanzanian traditional medicine; healers and their intimate becomings; and traditional birth attendants as institutional evocations. Part 3, 'Healing Matters,' explores alternative materialities, interferences and inclusions, and shifting existences, or being and not-being. There is a short conclusion on postcolonial ontological politics and a brief epilogue incorporating Langwick's newly born daughter into this 'family.' Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty/professionals. — Choice
This book is a tour de force. Grounded in theory derived from anthropology and science and technology studies, Stacey A. Langwick's vibrant account of healing in Tanzania is exemplary of ethnography at its best. Moving beyond the concept of medical pluralism and an oppositional comparison of traditional healing and biomedical practice, Langwick leads her readers into the arena of 'ontological politics' where frictions among local medical experts are laid bare, and disputes about what is 'real' take center stage. Her focus on the production and circulation of therapeutic objects and their intimate association with the multiple ways that bodies come to be objectified and subjectively experienced decenters assumptions about truth and power in the postcolonial era.
Compelling and radical . . . stunningly intimate, deeply intellectual, and thoroughly political.
Anthropologist Langwick's fieldwork in the town of Newala in southeastern Tanzania started in 1998. Shortly after arriving, the author had the good fortune to establish an association with Binti Dadi, a Muslim woman healer, and Mzee Kalimaga, a Christian male healer. For ten months during the initial field stay in 1998-99, Langwick (Cornell) apprenticed with Binti Dadi, even being called 'Binti Dadi mdogo'—little Binti Dadi. She returned to Newala for a couple of months in 2002 and 2003. She carried out her research in KiSwahili and provides a short glossary that translates and clarifies key concepts. A brief prologue sets the scene for the body of the discussion, which covers such topics as witchcraft, oracles, and native medicine; making Tanzanian traditional medicine; healers and their intimate becomings; and traditional birth attendants as institutional evocations. Part 3, 'Healing Matters,' explores alternative materialities, interferences and inclusions, and shifting existences, or being and not-being. There is a short conclusion on postcolonial ontological politics and a brief epilogue incorporating Langwick's newly born daughter into this 'family.' Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty/professionals. — Choice
"This book is a tour de force. Grounded in theory derived from anthropology and science and technology studies, Stacey A. Langwick's vibrant account of healing in Tanzania is exemplary of ethnography at its best. Moving beyond the concept of medical pluralism and an oppositional comparison of traditional healing and biomedical practice, Langwick leads her readers into the arena of 'ontological politics' where frictions among local medical experts are laid bare, and disputes about what is 'real' take center stage. Her focus on the production and circulation of therapeutic objects and their intimate association with the multiple ways that bodies come to be objectified and subjectively experienced decenters assumptions about truth and power in the postcolonial era."
Presents in-depth ethnographic information on a timely and relevant topic of long-standing interest, informing practical responses to significant social problems.