Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World [Paperback]

Medicines That Feed Usexamines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrasedawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine’s intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it.Dawa lisheis not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants.Medicines That Feed Usoffers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.USThrough an ethnography of plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that shape life in the twenty-first century.Stacey A. Langwick is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, author ofBodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania, and co-editor ofMedicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing.“With this beautiful, nuanced ethnography, Stacey Langwick has produced a landmark study of African healing.Medicines that Feed Ustakes readers through a set of experiments with plants by which Tanzanians theorize healing through practice in a toxic world. In refusing the false divideslCT