Authors: tracy J. Luedke, Harry G. West (Editor), Tracy J. Luedke
ISBN-13: 9780253218056, ISBN-10: 0253218055
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Date Published: December 2005
Edition: New Edition
Tracy J. Luedke is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern Illinois University.
Harry G. West is lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is author of Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique.
In southeast Africa, the power to heal is often associated with crossing borders, whether literal or metaphorical. This wide-ranging volume reveals that healers, whose power depends on the ability to broker therapeutic resources, also contribute to the construction of the borders they transgress. While addressing diverse healing practices such as herbalism, razor-blade vaccination, spirit possession, prophetic healing, missionary health clinics, and traumatic storytelling, the nine lively and provocative essays in Borders and Healers explore the creativity and resilience of the region's healers and those they heal in a world shaped by economic stagnation, declining state commitments to health care, and the AIDS pandemic. This important book contributes to understandings of the ways in which healing practices in southeast Africa mediate divides between the wealthy and the impoverished, the traditional and the modern, the local and the global.
Introduction : healing divides : therapeutic border work in Southeast Africa | 1 | |
1 | Working the borders to beneficial effect : the not-so-indigenous knowledge of not-so-traditional healers in Northern Mozambique | 21 |
2 | Presidents, bishops, and mothers : the construction of authority in Mozambican healing | 43 |
3 | Of markets and medicine : the changing significance of Zambabwean Muti in the age of intensified globalization | 65 |
4 | Money, modernity, and morality : traditional healing and the expansion of the Holy Spirit in Mozambique | 81 |
5 | Transnational images of pentecostal healing : comparative examples from Malawi and Botswana | 101 |
6 | From HIV/AIDS to Ukimwi : narrating local accounts of a cure | 125 |
7 | Geographies of medicine : interrogating the boundary between "traditional" and "modern" medicine in colonial Tanganyika | 143 |
8 | Shifting geographies of suffering and recovery : traumatic storytelling after apartheid | 166 |
Afterwood : ethnographic regions - healing, power, and history | 185 |