Description
Book SynopsisThe therapeutic gap between traditional and modern medicine
Trade ReviewBodies, Politics, and African Healing is a bold and imaginative account that deserves to be read not only as an ethnography of medical pluralities in postcolonial Tanzania but also as an exemplary investigation into the field of ontological politics that unsettles deep-seated assumptions about truth and power. It will change the way many anthropologists think and write about medical ontologies in Africa and elsewhere.
* Anthropology and Humanism *
This book contributes to the understanding of traditional medicine in a contemporary African setting. It makes clear the inequalities that shape the space under which healers must operate, and their efforts to work this to their advantage.
* Anthropos *
This is an important and convincing reframing not only of the meaning of healing in postcolonial Tanzania, but also of what healing does. Bodies, Politics, and African Healing successfully challenges us to reconsider the very way in which we think about African healing.
* Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *
Stacey Langwick draws on the insights raised by science technology studies and anthropological–historical analyses to reconsider what health and healing means in the town–district of Newala, situated on the edge of the Makonde Plateau, in southeastern Tanzania. . . She pushes readers to consider seriously how healers bring into material being the often unseen entities from other realms, an important part of their therapeutic practice39.2 May 2012
* American Ethnologist *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
A Note on Translation
Prologue: AIDS, Rats, and Soldiers' Belts
1. Orientations
Part 1. A Short Genealogy of Traditional Medicine
2. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Native Medicine
3. Making Tanzanian Traditional Medicine
Part 2. Hailing Traditional Experts
4. Healers and Their Intimate Becomings
5. Traditional Birth Attendants as Institutional Evocations
Part 3. Healing Matters
6. Alternative Materialities
7. Interferences and Inclusions
8. Shifting Existences, or Being and Not-Being
Conclusion: Postcolonial Ontological Politics
Epilogue
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
