Borders and Healers

In southeast Africa, the power to heal is often associated with crossing borders, whether literal or metaphorical. This wide-ranging volume reveals that healers, whose power depends on the ability to broker therapeutic resources, also contribute to the construction of the borders they transgress. Wh [...]
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In southeast Africa, the power to heal is often associated with crossing borders, whether literal or metaphorical. This wide-ranging volume reveals that healers, whose power depends on the ability to broker therapeutic resources, also contribute to the construction of the borders they transgress. While addressing diverse healing practices such as herbalism, razor-blade vaccination, spirit possession, prophetic healing, missionary health clinics, and traumatic storytelling, the nine lively and provocative essays in "Borders and Healers" explore the creativity and resilience of the region's healers and those they heal in a world shaped by economic stagnation, declining state commitments to health care, and the AIDS pandemic.This important book contributes to understandings of the ways in which healing practices in southeast Africa mediate divides between the wealthy and the impoverished, the traditional and the modern, the local and the global. Harry G. West is a lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.He is author of "Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique" (Chicago, forthcoming) and co-editor (with Todd Sanders) of "Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order", (Duke, 2003). Tracy J. Luedke is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington. Her dissertation considers bodies and questions of healing and health in Mozambique.