Those Who Touch: Tuareg Medicine Women in Anthropological Perspective (review)

The author is well known for her studies of the Tuareg of Mali and Niger, about whom she has extensively written. In her 2001 volume, Healing in Community Medicine: Contested Terrains, and Cultural Encounters among the Tuareg (Bergin & Garvey), she broadly discussed traditional Tuareg medicine, its negotiated position between religion and healing, and its essence as an intervention intended for a moral community rather than for a patient alone. In the volume under review here, her focus is on Tuareg medicine women who diagnose physical illness by touching, heal through the use of botanicals, and provide marital counseling.

The book is divided into three parts: "Departures: Herbal Medicine and Local and Authoritative Systems of Thought"; "Touch and Word: Learning and Transmitting Medicine"; and "Medicine Women and Wider Systems of Power." These in turn are subdivided into ten chapters. Early on, the author provides important benchmarks for the concepts of wellness, illness, and healing among Tuareg women healers, and then she discusses touch as the essential diagnostic modality in their system of therapeutics. In later chapters, Rasmussen explores not only the complex role these Tuareg medicine women play in addressing physical suffering and social conflicts, but also their discrete use of adjuvants such as divination and spirit mediumship, and their adaptive strategies in facing the increasing forces of social, political, and cultural change. Of special importance are Rasmussen's three final chapters, "Medicine Women and Islam," "Medicine Women and Other Shamans," and "Changes in the Wind." She illuminates these larger contextual issues through profiles of individual healers and case histories of those who have sought treatment.

During the past three decades, drought, famine, rebellion, and sedentarization have greatly reshaped the Tuareg world. With democratization in Mali has come a greater Tuareg involvement in the affairs of the nation-state, as well as its corollary of increased government involvement in their lives. Multidimensional development projects led by bilateral, multilateral, and nongovernmental organizations are reshaping the once isolated and autonomous world of the Tuareg in many ways. The author clearly describes how the traditional focus of Tuareg medicine women on communal healing is changing, as practitioners are forced to negotiate with a Western biomedical healing system whose focus is on the individual. Yet, as Rasmussen so thoroughly discusses, these women healers have ably accommodated to the increasing presence of Western biomedicine; they recognize its usefulness, framed by their understanding of these approaches, and often refer patients to nearby allopathic clinics. This form of negotiated accommodation with the "other" increasingly characterizes the world of Tuareg medicine women.

Susan Rasmussen's research has spanned a quarter century characterized by profound social, political, and cultural transformations among the Tuareg. She has presented Tuareg women healers in this volume in the context of this changing world while chronicling the complex mythical-historical origins of their herbal-based medicine. She has done so with clarity and insight, and as a result has produced an authoritative work that is a pleasure to read.