Full Description
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.
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Healing Divides: Therapeutic Border Work in Southeast AfricaHarry G. West and Tracy J. Luedke
1. Working the Borders to Beneficial Effect: The Not-So-Indigenous Knowledge of Not-So-Traditional Healers in Northern MozambiqueHarry G. West
2. Presidents, Bishops, and Mothers: The Construction of Authority in Mozambican HealingTracy J. Luedke
3. Of Markets and Medicine: The Changing Significance of Zimbabwean Muti in the Age of Intensified GlobalizationDavid Simmons
4. Money, Modernity, and Morality: Traditional Healing and the Expansion of the Holy Spirit in MozambiqueJames Pfeiffer
5. Transnational Images of Pentecostal Healing: Comparative Examples from Malawi and BotswanaRijk van Dijk
6. From HIV/AIDS to Ukimwi: Narrating Local Accounts of a Cure Julian M. Murchison
7. Geographies of Medicine: Interrogating the Boundary between "Traditional" and "Modern" Medicine in Colonial TanganyikaStacey Langwick
8. Shifting Geographies of Suffering and Recovery: Traumatic Storytelling after ApartheidChristopher J. Colvin
Afterword: Ethnographic Regions—Healing, Power, and HistorySteven Feierman
References Cited
Contributors
Index
