In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Twelve Guinean Migrant Traditional Healers in the Global Market Clara Carvalho West African traditional therapists, healers, and ritual experts have crossed national and continental borders, spreading their therapeutic knowledge and worldview along their migrant itineraries. Nowadays, in every southern European capital, West African therapists act professionally in different contexts and for a varied clientele, including African and non-African, immigrant and local patients. Being migrant workers themselves, they become cultural brokers, mediating circuits of information and power amongst their patients. Although this process is not a new one, it changed in scope and vitality in the 1990s,adecademarkedbytheimpositionof structuraladjustmentplans(SAPs) on indebted southern economies, a measure that led to the liberalization of the markets but also increased the impoverishment of both the working class and the emerging middle class in Africa, contributing to the flow of migrants from the global South to the global North. Amongst these migrants seeking better lives were therapists, religious experts, and other professional healers practicing local traditions. The mobility of such traditional workers has long been noticed in different African settings at a regional level, as has their capacity to adapt their knowledge to different challenges and situations (Feierman 2006; West and Luedke 2006). In 1992, Feierman and Janzen drew attention to the changing patterns of health and healing in Africa. Nowadays patients have a varied set of options for diagnosis and treatment, and it is the reasons behind their choices that anthropologists try to understand when studying the concepts of health and disease from the patients’ point of view. Patients can choose amongst local healing traditions, both religious and biomedical, which have their own distribution in time and space. These different systems have their own dynamic, and (as medical anthropologists have stressed) so-called “healing traditions” have changed according to the new conditions of health and disease of their patients (Feierman and Janzen 1992; Nichter and Lock 2002). Different living conditions resulting from changes in political control and economic production, as well as new or newly widespread diseases (espe- GUINEAN MIGRANT TRADITIoNAL HEALERS 317 cially tuberculosis, malaria, and now HIV/AIDS), have led healing practices to change accordingly. This is particularly true for migrant populations, both within Africa and beyond. The intensification of the flow of migrants from Africa to Europe has made the movement of both people and ideas, including healing practices, along the migration routes more obvious, and created a new challenge for traditional healers. My claim in this chapter is that the new migration circuits act as a parallel and inverse movement to the diffusion of both biomedicine and pharmaceutical products, and should be understood in the context of the transnational flows that characterize the modern age—as well as being appreciated as one of the best examples of cultural globalization (Whyte, van der Geest, and Hardon 2002). Globalization is a multilevel phenomenon, and the dissemination of multiple therapeutic practices brought into Europe by migrant populations is a good example of the dual circulation of healing practices. In order to obtain an insight into the complexity of this process, I will present a multi-sited ethnography, following traditional therapists through the migrant circuits that have led them to cross not only physical borders but cultural ones marked by distinct meaning systems and contrasting cosmogonies . The practices, actions, and interpretations of these therapists are better understood as answers to the challenges of life experiences in which clashing events, different labor markets, and sociogeographical contexts have to be integrated by both the therapists and their patients into daily practices. The focus of this chapter is Guinean traditional therapists working in Portugal and France who participate in a wider migration movement that originates in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal and is directed toward Portugal, Spain, and France. It has long been stressed in the literature that local or traditional therapists deal with affliction problems broadly understood (classified as misfortunes in classic works by Edward Evans-Pritchard or Jeanne Favret-Saada). This category includes occupational, familiar, affective , and sexual troubles, besides dealing with health problems. Currently there are two categories of professionals dealing with affliction problems amongst Guinean immigrants in Portugal: mouros or marabouts, and jambakus . Marabouts are part of a widespread movement that has been acting in Europe for decades and has achieved some public recognition (Kuczynski 2002). Jambakus, on the other hand, represent a local form of cult, performing as diviners, ritual experts, and healers in local areas of Guinea-Bissau and southern Senegal. Their recent integration into the transnational market has to be...

Share