Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa

Description

Africa and medicine in a globalized world

Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa—and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.

Hansjörg Dilger, Abdoulaye Kane, and Stacey A. Langwick Introduction
Part 1. Scale as an Effect of Power
1. The Choreography of Global Subjection: The Traditional Birth Attendant in Contemporary Configurations of World Health Stacey A. Langwick
2. Targeting the Empowered Individual: Transnational Policy-Making, the Global Economy of Aid and the Limitations of 'Biopower' in Tanzania Hansjörg Dilger
3. Health Security on the Move. Biobureaucracy, Solidarity and the Transfer of Health Insurance to Senegal Angelika Wolf
4. Afri-global Medicine: New Perspectives on Epidemics, Drugs, Wars, Migrations, and Healing-rituals John Janzen
5. AIDS Policies for Markets and Warriors: Dispossession, Capital, and Pharmaceuticals in Nigeria Kristin Peterson
Part 2. Alternative Forms of Globality
6. Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Mali and Togo: Circulating Knowledge, Mobile Technology, Transnational Efforts Viola Hörbst
7. Flows of Medicine, Healers, Health Professionals, and Patients between Home and Host Countries Abdoulaye Kane
8. Public Health or Public Threat? Polio Eradication Campaigns, Islamic Revival, and the Materialization of State Power in Niger Adeline Masquelier
9. School of Deliverance: Healing, Exorcism and Male Spirit Possession in the Ghanaian Presbyterian Diaspora Adam Mohr
Part 3. Moving through the Gaps
10. It's Just Like the Internet: Transnational Healing Practices between Somaliland and the Somali Diaspora Marja Tiilikainen
11. Mobility and Connectedness: Chinese Medical Doctors in Kenya Elisabeth Hsu
12. Guinean Migrant Traditional Healers in the Global Market Clara Carvalho
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Health Care Delivery
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• África
• General officer
• Medicine
• History of Africa
• Anthropology
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005328
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

MEDICINE, MOBILITY, AND POWER IN GLOBAL AFRICA
MEDICINE, MOBILITY, AND POWER IN GLOBAL AFRICA
TRANSNATIONAL HEALTH AND HEALING
EDITED BY
HANSJ RG DILGER, ABDOULAYE KANE,
AND
STACEYA. LANGWICK
This book is a publication of
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2012 by Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Medicine, mobility, and power in global Africa : transnational health and healing / edited by Hansj rg Dilger, Abdoulaye Kane, and Stacey A. Langwick.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35709-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-22368-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00532-8 (eb)
1. Medical care-Africa. 2. Health services accessibility-Africa. 3. Traditional medicine-Africa. I. Dilger, Hansj rg. II. Kane, Abdoulaye. III. Langwick, Stacey Ann.
RA545.M47 2012
362.1096-dc23 2012005731
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Transnational Medicine, Mobile Experts / Stacey A. Langwick, Hansj rg Dilger, and Abdoulaye Kane
PART 1 .
SCALE AS AN EFFECT OF POWER

1 The Choreography of Global Subjection: The Traditional Birth Attendant in Contemporary Configurations of World Health / Stacey A. Langwick

2 Targeting the Empowered Individual: Transnational Policy Making, the Global Economy of Aid, and the Limitations of Biopower in Tanzania / Hansj rg Dilger

3 Health Security on the Move: Biobureaucracy, Solidarity, and the Transfer of Health Insurance to Senegal / Angelika Wolf

4 Afri-global Medicine: New Perspectives on Epidemics, Drugs, Wars, Migrations, and Healing Rituals / John M. Janzen

5 AIDS Policies for Markets and Warriors: Dispossession, Capital, and Pharmaceuticals in Nigeria / Kristin Peterson
PART 2 .
ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF GLOBALITY

6 Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Mali and Togo: Circulating Knowledge, Mobile Technology, Transnational Efforts / Viola H rbst

7 Flows of Medicine, Healers, Health Professionals, and Patients between Home and Host Countries / Abdoulaye Kane

8 Public Health or Public Threat? Polio Eradication Campaigns, Islamic Revival, and the Materialization of State Power in Niger / Adeline Masquelier

9 School of Deliverance: Healing, Exorcism, and Male Spirit Possession in the Ghanaian Presbyterian Diaspora / Adam Mohr
PART 3 .
MOVING THROUGH THE GAPS

10 It s Just Like the Internet: Transnational Healing Practices between Somaliland and the Somali Diaspora / Marja Tiilikainen

11 Mobility and Connectedness: Chinese Medical Doctors in Kenya / Elisabeth Hsu

12 Guinean Migrant Traditional Healers in the Global Market / Clara Carvalho
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is a product of the intellectual excitement the three of us shared together as faculty in a vibrant and dynamic Center for African Studies at the University of Florida in the early 2000s. In 2006, with the support of the University of Florida we organized a small working conference on transnationalism and medicine in Africa. The complexity of the issues and our desire to continue the conversation there gave rise to this volume. A few of the presentations given at that conference provided the seeds for chapters in this book. Others have joined us since then. While we editors are now each in different universities and on two different continents, we have treasured the excuse working on this volume provided to continue our conversations on a regular basis.
We would like to extend a very special thank-you to Leonardo Villal n, director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida 2003-2011. He supported both us and this generative international conversation. We thank the students in Professor Dilger s graduate seminar Mobility and Health in Africa, which led up to the conference in the fall of 2006. We also appreciate the range of support that we received for the original conference from Kenneth Sassaman, Allan Burns, Corinna Greene, and Ikeade Akinyemi. We benefited from the generous funding of the International Office at the University of Florida. Susan Reynolds Whyte was a gifted and generative discussant at the conference. We owe a special thank-you to her for her invaluable input. We thank Julie Livingston, Brenda Chalfin, and Luise White for their intellectual interventions. The Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universit t (Berlin) and the Department of Anthropology in Cornell University granted funding for the preparation of the book. Carla Dietzel provided invaluable administrative support in managing deadlines and submissions as well as excellent skills in layout.
Edited volumes are always a process and we thank the authors for their patience. Dee Mortensen understood the value of the conversation that this volume catalyzes and was a skillful editor. We thank Marisa Maza for the cover work, and Jeff Bercuvitz for hosting the three of us in Ithaca for a critical meeting of the editors. We hope that in the coming years this volume will generate more conversations and scholarly exchange on the transnationalization of health, medicine, and healing in and beyond Africa.
MEDICINE, MOBILITY, AND POWER IN GLOBAL AFRICA
INTRODUCTION
Transnational Medicine, Mobile Experts
Ethnographic and historical work on healing and medicine in Africa reveals a great deal about politics and power; social organization and economic conditions; global regimes of value and local practices of valuing bodies, kin, and community. Medicine is significant not only for its therapeutic effects on individual bodies, whether biological, symbolic, spiritual, or otherwise mediated. Medicine and healing, as Steven Feierman (1985) argues, have also long been implicated in the organization and transformation of social and communal life in the sub-Saharan African region-and vice versa. Therefore, on a larger scale, as medicinal substances, therapeutic practices, and healing practitioners (as well as the institutions, technologies, policies, and ethical frameworks to which they adhere) circulate, they shape myriad aspects of social, political, and economic life. This volume takes the mobility of medicines, patients, and experts as its primary object of investigation. Few studies of the postcolonial transnationalisms that shape medicine in or out of Africa have included both traditional and modern medicines in their accounts. Yet the histories of traditional medicine, religious healing, and biomedicine are intertwined, and all indicate the importance of regional and inter-regional movement.
That mobility is power is an old truism in African healing. Even in precolonial times, healing powers were assumed to increase significantly with the movements of healers and medicinal products across often wide regional distances (Comaroff 1981). Traditional African therapies and healers traveling from afar have long claimed heightened potency (Digby 2004), while biomedicine spread throughout the continent as a result of missionization, colonization, and international development (Vaughan 1991). Equally, military conquests as well as the establishing of labor markets, urban centers, and the associated infrastructures of mobility in colonial settings paved the way for the spread of epidemic diseases and mobile pathogens (Feierman 1985: 85f.); this in turn effected medical interventions and long-term changes in local social and moral orders (Ranger 1992:247) and facilitated the incorporation of Africa into the emerging capitalist world order.
The authors in this volume train attention on the transnational mobilities of therapies and therapeutic experts as they shape life, health, and healing for contemporary Africans. Together, these chapters catalyze new ways of understanding the imaginations, networks, movements, and practices-as well as the hopes, disillusions, and failures -that comprise contemporary globalized medicine. In so doing, they describe some of the forces shaping contemporary human experiences of affliction and healing that have often gone unacknowledged in studies more tightly organized around specific medical systems or geographic locales.
We begin from the belief that accounting for globalization today requires a careful examination and historicization of mobility as an effect of power. This includes official movements-of international development experts, international migrants, consultants, essential medicines, WHO guidelines and national policy documents-as well as smuggled remnants of pharmaceutical prescriptions, remittances from distant relatives, and the circulation of traditional healers and medicines. We also attend to the side effects of biomedical programs-from the resistance to Western childhood vaccines in Niger to the end of the indigenous pharmacy industry in Nigeria. We describe the disconnects between public hea