Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania

Notes

Notes Prologue 1. Binti means “daughter of.” For a girl child, it is used after a given name and before the father’s name—for instance, Fatma binti Dadi. 2. Binti Dadi and Binti Mayaula were related through their maternal grandmother, who was also remembered as a great healer and who visited Binti Dadi in her dreams. 3. Throughout the book, I translate mahoka (Kimakonde) as “ancestral shades.” Each person is said to leave a mahoka on the earth when they die even as their roho (soul) is said to leave their body. These mahoka visit living relatives in sleeping and waking “dreams” and are central to the transmission of healing knowledge. For a more detailed description, see chapter 4. 4. A respectful title for an older man in Kiswahili. 5. Safi literally means “clean,” but here it connotes “impressive” or “striking.” 6. All conversations unless otherwise noted occurred in Kiswahili. 7. Kalimaga’s first language is Kiyao. An mYao is someone who identifies as part of the Yao, one of the prominent groups found in southern Tanzania. 8. The AIDS counselor in the Newala District Hospital translated this malady as her­ pes zoster, or shingles (personal conversation, June 5, 2003). 1. Orientations 1. Dr. Mhame (2000), who has headed the traditional medicine units in both the National Institute of Medical Research and the Ministry of Health in Tanzania, estimates in a paper for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development that traditional healers serve as the first point of contact for 60 percent of Tanzanians seeking health ser­ vices and that a majority of the population “depends on traditional medicine for primary health care” (1). 2. My thinking about these issues has been influenced by the conversation in science and technology studies about boundary objects. See especially Star and Griesemer (1989). 3. For particularly influential examples see Comaroff (1985), Comaroff and Comaroff (1997), Hunt (1999), Livingston (2005), Stoller (1995), Weiss (1992, 1998), White (2000), and West (2005). 4. This phrase is borrowed from Tiffany (2000). 5. Idhe and Selinger’s edited volume Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality (2003) evokes the contours of this literature in interesting ways through interviews with and essays by Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, and Andrew Pickering as well as analytical essays comparing the work of these four individuals. 248 Notes to pages 8–15 6. Concern with the ontology of scientific objects has been central to much work in science studies, from Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s early study of thyrotropin releas­ ing actor (TRF) (1979) to Annemarie Mol’s work on atherosclerosis (2002). The collection of essays edited by Lorraine Daston in Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000) is a good introduction to key positions in the field. Another key reference point is Andrew Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice (1995). Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol’s edited volume Differences in Medicine (1998) brings together studies of diverse objects of medical care enacted through different medical specialties and disciplinary practices. Panels at the 2004 joint meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology addressed some of the emerging issues related to the ontology of scientific objects (“Onto Ontics and Ontology: Working, Testing, and Appreciating Nature-Cultures” organized by John Law, Annemarie Mol, and Helen Verran, and “The Ontology of Scientific Objects,” organized by Jenene Wiedemer). Another session at the conference on Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (2002) discussed Mol’s contribution to this literature in an “Author Meets Critics” roundtable. The ontological debates in science studies circles have been productively engaged by medical anthropologists exploring the history of particular diseases (e.g., Young’s [1995] study of posttraumatic stress disorder), the diversity of biological experience (e.g., Lock’s work on menopause [1993b, 1993c] and brain death [2002]), and the ways that disease categories travel (e.g., Cohen’s [1998] examination of Alzheimer’s and aging in India). 7. Classic science studies literature that sets the stage for these debates include Barad (1999), Galison (1999), Latour (1988), Rheinberger (1997), and Shapin and Schaffer (1985). For an overview of the anthropology of new medical technologies, see the edited volumes by Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit (1998) and by Margaret Lock, Allan Young, and Alberto Cambrosio (2000). Important advances in this conversation have also been made by Joseph Dumit in his work on PET scanning (2003) and new medical objects. 8. This point was...