Bodies, Politics and African Healing is an ambitious, intriguing book which ultimately falls short of delivering on its theoretical promises. It is worth reading for its rich accounts of contemporary healing practices in Africa, even though it is at times weighed down by its own conceptual reach and attendant jargon.
Langwick’s book is based on several years of observation with Tanzanian healers at work in the late 1990s, supplemented by archival research on the interactions and interfaces between biomedical and “traditional” healing. Her goal, stated throughout, is to examine the coexistence and mutual intelligibility of medical science and its “others”—magic, witchcraft, and traditional healing. She studies the constitution of noxious entities or states of being, whether understood as viruses, disease, shetani (demons), or uchawi (witchcraft), and the ways in which people act on these states of being, whether through recourse to the biomedical resources of the clinic or through dreams and spirit possession. The question of intelligibility introduces the “ontological politics” that populate the strongest sections of this text—what is real, what can be acted upon, and how does this action produce effects?
Her essential aim is to create a series of ontologies related to health, sickness, and healing; and her work is strongest when she sticks with her intent to examine how “entities and gestures are brought together in an effort to shape a vague mass of threats into manageable trajectories, to identify stable actors, and to establish objects of therapeutic intervention” (172). She makes a good case that similar processes of objectification and constitution are at work in biomedical science and in its “others,” and that indeed biomedical science and the “others” come to mutually constitute each other.
In particular, she draws attention to the diversity and variability of the nonhuman entities or “actants,” in Bruno Latour’s words, who participate in so-called traditional medicine and in magical practices. In addition to this ontological work, she delineates the different epistemologies, or ways of finding truth in the body, that are practiced under different regimes of health and medicine.
However, her embedding of this project within science studies often means that it gets bogged down in excursions into too many postmodern and antifoundationalist theories and theorists. These are interesting and worthwhile in their own right, but their proliferation within the text means that each individual idea gets short shrift, with the result that some of the more abstract sections of her work read a bit like exegeses of philosophical jargon. Her theoretical framing is much more successful when she hews to postcolonial political economy, which emerges strongly toward the end of the book.
Langwick makes the bold assertion that she will depart from more conventional anthropology and social history by rejecting an essentially social-constructionist account of traditional healing. That is, she seeks to avoid an account in which traditional healing modalities are understood to work because they activate social relations among the participants or perform other socially functional roles, rather than having presocial existences in the way that viruses and other biomedically recognized pathogens are understood as having a nonsocial existence. This radical materialism is promising, but ultimately unsatisfying, because Langwick’s own position on the materiality of magic, nonhuman actants, and other entities outside the reach of conventional social science is not clear.
For example, in her discussion of degedege, a malady of children that health workers claim is actually malaria, Langwick asserts that she does not want to “relegate much of the substances and many of the practices [involved in treating degedege]…to the emotional, symbolic or cultural—that is, to the powerful but limited workings of society” (191). Such statements lead to the following question: what is Langwick’s own position on the reality of degedege? Does she believe that it exists as something other than a local gloss for malaria? And if so, how does this belief, or agnosticism, concerning degedege shape her own research?
This combination of radical conceptual leaps and limited analytic or empirical follow-through recurs in Langwick’s work. The book is replete with intriguing section headings and titles such as the “ontics of dreaming,” “being and time” [a nod to Heidegger?], “being and non-being,” and “materializing difference,” but these grand philosophical concepts lack the sort of detailed grounding in empirical evidence that would justify their breadth.
Perhaps ironically, this book is most successful when the author steps back from radical cultural studies and carries out more mainstream social history analyses. Her chapter on the history of “traditional medicine” as a category in colonial and postcolonial Tanzanian governance is particularly strong, and she makes a good case that “traditional medicine” is itself a postcolonial category. Africa-watchers will probably not be surprised to learn that China was a major player in creating a status for traditional medicine in the postcolonial Tanzanian government as far back as the 1960s. Her analysis of the invention of tradition in the case of “traditional birth attendants,” who are being incorporated, under various regimes, into the biomedical work of the clinic, is similarly strong.
This book is rich with detailed incidents of healing or attempted healing, but the actual work done by the author in researching and writing is curiously opaque, especially for a book that is focused on practice itself. In order to understand better the arguments put forward by the author, it would be useful to know what exactly she did, within the broad optic of participant observation, how she fit into the southern Tanzanian community that is the focus of most of the book, what aspects of life she was privy to and what aspects were excluded, and how her own identity shaped the ontologies she is able to construct.
In summary, Bodies, Health and Healing is a valuable but flawed contribution to the social history of healing in East Africa. Despite the book’s limitations, the author gives readers ample reasons to look forward to her future contributions.
