Bodies, Politics, and African Healing

"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"

~B. M. du Toit, emeritus, University of Florida

"Bodies, 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

"Presents in-depth ethnographic information on a timely and relevant topic of long-standing interest, informing practical responses to significant social problems."

~Tracy J. Luedke, Northeastern Illinois University

"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."

~Margaret Lock, McGill University

"Compelling and radical . . . stunningly intimate, deeply intellectual, and thoroughly political."

~Julie Livingston, Rutgers University