Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal: Essays In Africanist Medical Anthropology

Abstract

The essays in this collection reflect the author’s thinking about sickness, health, and healing in Central Africa in the early years of the 21st century.“Representations, ritual, and social renewal” encapsulates a perspective on Africanist medical anthropology that is sensitive to how issues of disease, health and healing are seen, communicated, symbolized; how they are situated in concrete behaviors and political-economic structures and conditions that affect health; and how they are engaged by common people, specialists, and leaders in projects and endeavors to ameliorate health. Although the setting of most essays is in the Kongo region of Western Equatorial Africa (the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Angola, and southern Republic of Congo-Brazzaville), where the author conducted much of his fieldwork, some topics have a wider sweep, such as: the verbal cognates of Bantu-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa, and the sub-continental distribution of some institutions and concepts; the environmental settings for therapeutic traditions in rainforest, savanna, and semi-arid regions; the presence of environmentally-triggered diseases such as malaria, ebola, sleeping sickness, etc. As argued in the Introduction, it is the author’s conviction that the history of health and healing in sub-Saharan Africa is shaped by a unique and pressing array of diseases and economic conditions, such that a unique medical anthropology emerges from the study of these issues and histories.