1st Edition
Public Health and Spiritual Afflictions in Africa and the Diaspora Epistemic Politics of Plural Healing Worlds
Introduction – Reimagining Public Health’s Epistemic Infrastructures from the Lived Realities of Spiritual Healing
Boris Koenig
Chapter 1 – Affliction, Healing, and Everyday Religion: Perceptions of Well-Being, Ill Health, and its Remedy in Zanzibar
Kjersti Larsen
Chapter 2 – The Payment of Spiritual Debts as Restitution Among the Babanki of Northwest Cameroon
Eric Makiyighome Tum and Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta
Chapter 3 – Kindoki, Institutional Legitimacy, and Public Health in the Lower Congo
John M. Janzen
Chapter 4 – Entrepreneurs of Grievances and Entertainment: Negotiating Social Contention and Healing in Mozambique
Victor Igreja
Chapter 5 – “Walking the Road to Death”: Perspectives on Cancer Causation and Interventions Among West African Immigrants in France
Carolyn Sargent
Chapter 6 – Spiritual Afflictions and Disagreements: Unpacking ‘Collaboration’ Between Community Psychiatry and Spiritual Healing in Rural Southwestern Ghana
Cecilia Draicchio
Chapter 7 – Navigating Medical Pluralism: HIV/AIDS and Traditional Healing Practices in South Africa
Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta
Chapter 8 – Nganga and Public Health: How to Deal with the Ambiguities of Healing?
Peter Geschiere
Chapter 9 – “Waganga Use Culture, Not Science”: Traditional Healing, COVID-19, and Epistemic Contestation in Tanzania
Amy Nichols-Belo
Chapter 10 – Debilitating Afflictions, Christian and Islamic Healing Centers, and the Reshaping of Public Health in Côte d’Ivoire
Boris Koenig
Epilogue
Adam Ashforth
Biography
Boris Koenig is an FNRS postdoctoral fellow at UCLouvain (Belgium) and a former SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan (Department of Afroamerican and African Studies). He has conducted ethnographic research in urban and rural Côte d’Ivoire since 2012, including long-term fieldwork in Abidjan. His current research focuses on public health and spiritual healing, the use of digital technologies among young adults, and generational change in Côte d’Ivoire.
"Public Health and Spiritual Afflictions in Africa and the Diaspora provides a nuanced look into the complex relationships between public health and a wide range of spiritual healing practices from across sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora. Never content to accept simple appeals to inclusion or collaboration at face value, the authors draw on detailed ethnographic cases to explore how epistemic legitimacy is produced and negotiated within and beyond institutional boundaries."
China Scherz, Professor of Global Affairs, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, USA.
"A fascinating and profound set of cases written by a marvelous combination of starstudded and emerging scholars, Public Health and Spiritual Afflictions in Africa and the Diaspora reveals links of co-creation among belonging, exclusion, and public health structures in conditions of medical pluralism. Taking the social dynamics of spiritual insecurity seriously, it proposes new means to address epistemic dialogue among states, healers, patients, and kin, aiming to improve African and African-diasporic experiences of health and care by reshaping global health’s epistemic foundations."
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Broom Professor of Anthropology and Social Demography, Carleton College, USA.
