Outside the reach of the x -ray: Traditional healing and biomedicine in southern Tanzania.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intersections between traditional healing and Christianity in southern Tanzania. The primary research was carried out in 1999 and 2000 in a town that has grown up around a Roman Catholic abbey accompanied by a variety of institutions, including a mission hospital. In this setting, both traditional healing and biomedicine were available with relatively few impediments to their use. Information for the dissertation was collected through nearly 250 interviews with traditional healers, biomedical doctors and nurses, patients, and others as well as through participant-observation at traditional healing activities and at the mission hospital. Analysis in the dissertation builds from the idea that illness experiences are often points of particularly illuminating and intense cultural production, manipulation, and negotiation. The primary analytical focus is premised on the idea that understandings of place---both physical and metaphoric or symbolic---are central ideas that emerged in the course of Tanzanians' experiences with health and illness, particularly as they narrated these experiences verbally. Therefore, the dissertation proceeds by shifting the ethnographic lens from one site to the next in order to build a topography of health and illness as it relates to the local landscape. Ultimately, traditional healing and biomedicine are mutually constitutive of each other in this ethnographic situation. In these contexts of illness and healing, Tanzanians employed a relatively complex interwoven set of symbols that extended beyond the specifics of a particular illness and an individual's personal experiences. On the local level, symbols associated with the church, ethnicity, history, nature, divination, and witchcraft were among the many recurring symbols. However, relevant symbols were not restricted to the local level. Discussions of health and illness in Peramiho extended to and refracted upon a larger geographic scale, including the region, nation, and the globe. On this level, multivalent symbols such as science and technology and skin color frequently emerged as highly salient and symbolic of individuals' and groups' place in the world. These local and larger scale geographies are interconnected.