1st Edition
Religious Leadership for Family Planning Insights from Tanzania
Introduction
Chapter 1: List from Afar
Chapter 2: Peopling the List
Chapter 3: Winning the Community
Chapter 4: Schooling Religious Leaders
Chapter 5: Of Science and Superstition
Chapter 6: Selective Engagement
Chapter 7: Uwepo, Spiritual Presence
Conclusion
Biography
Mohamed Yunus Rafiq is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, New York University Shanghai, China. He lives and works in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, and Shanghai, China.
"With a novelist’s eye for detail and unparalleled depth of local understanding, Mohamed Yunus Rafiq offers a brilliant portrait of religious leadership in the NGO age. He traces how ordinary Muslim teachers and counselors are drafted into a family planning campaign, imbued with moral authority, and ultimately transformed as they mediate the frictions of global heath in a Tanzanian village. An innovative and theoretically sophisticated work, Religious Leadership for Family Planning brims with insights into the paradoxes of participatory development and its new configurations of governance, spirit, and personhood in 21st century African worlds."
Mike Degani, University of Cambridge, Assistant Professor of Environmental Anthropology, UK.
“An engaging insight into the work of community intermediaries connecting global health with local realities in rural Tanzania. This sensitive ethnography sheds light on the everyday work of local religious leaders in managing these relationships and their own reputations in the complex world of village politics and vested interests in an economy dominated by international health interests."
Maia Green, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK.
"What is a community, a religious leader, a tradition? Religious Leadership for Family Planning recognizes how these categories are not epistemic constants but, for better or worse, products of intervention in the face of an overwhelming public health need. Mohamed Yunus Rafiq does not speculate about how the social is remade in the imagination of international health and development schemes––his is a fine-grained account made in the midst of that remaking."
Todd Meyers, Professor and Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University Canada.
