Borders and Healers Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa [Paperback]

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 regions 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.

Well-written, thought-provoking, and grounded in fieldwork, this volume is written for anthropologists and will also be useful for public health professionals. . . . it will be invaluable for those teaching upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses on African health, and for anthropologists interested in therapeutic pluralism and theories of healing.

Contents<\>
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Healing Divides: Therapeutic Border Work in Southeast Africa Harry G. West and Tracy J. Luedke
1. Working the Borders to Beneficial Effect: The Not-So-Indigenous Knowledge of Not-So-Traditional Healers in Northern Mozambique Harry G. West
2. Presidents, Bishops, and Mothers: The Construction of Authority in Mozambican Healing Tracy J. Luedke
3. Of Markets and Medicine: The Changing Significance of Zimbabwean Muti in the Age of Intensified Globalization David Simmons
4. Money, Modernity, and Morality: Traditional Healing and the Expansion of the Holy Spirit in Mozambique James Pfeiffer
5. Trals)