Borders And Healers

by Luedke, Tracy J.; West, Harry G.

• ISBN13: 9780253218056
• ISBN10: 0253218055
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-12-01
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

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.Harry G. West is a 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 (Chicago, forthcoming) and co-editor (with Todd Sanders) of Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, (Duke, 2003).Tracy J. Luedke is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington. Her dissertation considers bodies and questions of healing and health in Mozambique.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: Healing Divides: Therapeutic Border Work in Southeast Africa	1	(20)
Harry G. West
Tracy J. Luedke
Working the Borders to Beneficial Effect: The Not-So-Indigenous Knowledge of Not-So-Traditional Healers in Northern Mozambique	21	(22)
Harry G. West
Presidents, Bishops, and Mothers: The Construction of Authority in Mozambican Healing	43	(22)
Tracy J. Luedke
Of Markets and Medicine: The Changing Significance of Zimbabwean Muti in the Age of Intensified Globalization	65	(16)
David Simmons
Money, Modernity, and Morality: Traditional Healing and the Expansion of the Holy Spirit in Mozambique	81	(20)
James Pfeiffer
Transnational Images of Pentecostal Healing: Comparative Examples from Malawi and Botswana	101	(24)
Rijk van Dijk
From HIV/AIDS to Ukimwi: Narrating Local Accounts of a Cure	125	(18)
Julian M. Murchison
Geographies of Medicine: Interrogating the Boundary between ``Traditional'' and ``Modern'' Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika	143	(23)
Stacey Langwick
Shifting Geographies of Suffering and Recovery: Traumatic Storytelling after Apartheid	166	(19)
Christopher J. Colvin
Afterword: Ethnographic Regions--Healing, Power, and History	185	(10)
Steven Feierman
References Cited	195	(22)
Contributors	217	(2)
Index	219