Borders and healers : brokering therapeutic resources in southeast Africa / edited by Tracy J. Luedke and Harry G. West.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Luedke, Tracy J.

West, Harry G.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Traditional medicine--Africa, Southern.

Healing--Africa, Southern.

Therapeutics--Africa, Southern.

Human body--Social aspects--Africa, Southern.

Manners and customs.

Human body--Social aspects.

Therapeutics.

Healing.

Traditional medicine.

Africa, Southern--Social life and customs.

Southern Africa.

Physical Description:

vi, 223 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2006]

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 dependds 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:

Introduction: Healing divides : therapeutic border work in southeast Africa / Harry G. West and Tracy J. Luedke

Working the borders to beneficial effect : the not-so-indigenous knowledge of not-so-traditional healers in northern Mozambique / Harry G. West

Presidents, bishops, and mothers : the construction of authority in Mozambican healing / Tracy J. Luedke

Of markets and medicine : the changing significance of Zimbabwean muti in the age of intensified globalization / David Simmons

Money, modernity, and morality : traditional healing and the expansion of the Holy Spirit in Mozambique / James Pfeiffer

Transnational images of Pentecostal healing : comparative examples from Malawi and Botswana / Rijk van Dijk

From HIV/AIDS to ukimwi : narrating local accounts of a cure / Julian M. Murchison

Geographies of medicine : interrogating the boundary between "traditional" and "modern" medicine in colonial Tanganyika / Stacey Langwick

Shifting geographies of suffering and recovery : traumatic storytelling after apartheid / Christopher J. Colvin

Afterword: Ethnographic regions

healing, power, and history / Steven Feierman.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [195]-216) and index.

ISBN:

0253346630

0253218055

OCLC:

60589088