African Ritual Practices – II: Health, Illness, and Healing Systems

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ESSAY GUILDLINE

African Ritual Practices – II: Health, Illness, and Healing Systems
Themes
● Traditional Forms of Illness; ● Medical Pluralism and Religious Healing; ● Health, Healing and Construction of Clinical Reality; ● Transformation of Western/ Global Medicine.

Theoretical Framework
● “African Traditional Medical Practices” (Mungazi, 1996:71-97)
Essentials of medical practices; Traditional healers, diviners and herbalists, and their fields; Methods of medical treatment; Differences and similarities with Western systems; Implications of medical practices in traditional culture.
● “African Healers and their Intimate Becoming” (Langwick, 2011:87-120)
Who are African healers? Distinguishing Types of Expertise; Becoming a healer: African genealogies; Distinctions among Non-Humans; The Ontics of dreaming, Ontics of treatment; The Practices of knowledge

Analysis of Selected Case Study
(1) “Religious Healing Among Societies in Mozambique” (Grosz-Ngaté, 2014:140-160)
The background of the societies in Central Mozambique, their cosmology and beliefs, and that are applied in their healing system; Medical pluralism and religious healing; Prophets as Ngoma, their roles and methods of healing; Illness categories and causations; Three examples of patients and prophets.
(2) “Interferences and Inclusions: Matter of Maladies in Tanzania” (Langwick, 2011:175-206)
The background of the societies in Tanzania, their cosmology and beliefs, and how that are applied in their healing system; Degedege and Malaria: the two most common threats; Locating the Comparison; Healers’ Series of Encounters; Three Case Studies in Newala; Comparative Studies: the Degedege Practice verses Malaria Practice; Propositions, Articulation, and Causality; Politics and Translation.
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Readings
Langwick, Stacey A., “Healers and their Intimate Becoming,” in Bodies, Politics, and African
Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011,
pp.87-120.

Langwick, Stacey A., “Interferences and Inclusions,” in Bodies, Politics, and African Healing:
The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011,
pp.175-206.

Luedke, Trace J., “Health, Illness, and Healing in African Societies,” in Africa, 4th edition, edited
by Maria Grosz-Ngaté, John H Hanson and Patrick O’Meara, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2014, pp.140-160.

Mungazi, Dickson A., “African Traditional Medical Practices” in Gathering Under the Mango
Tree: Values in Traditional Culture in Africa, New York: Peter Lang, 1996, pp.71-97