Healing in Community: Medicine, Contested Terrains, and Cultural Encounters Among the Tuareg FROM THE PUBLISHER
Exploring the multiple communities of healing among the Tuareg people of Niger, this work examines the beliefs and practices that surround healing and the quest for medicine. In studying ideals of healing that face challenges from wider political and economic forces, the author enables us to understand these culturally and historically constructed processes. This leads us to comprehend how many Tuareg construct and deconstruct local notions of medicine and healers, how patients cope with current problems in health care, and more broadly, how medical knowledge is constructed in anthropology and ethnography.
SYNOPSIS
Documents Tuareg responses to medicine and healing in northern Niger's current predicament of ecological disaster, economic crisis, and political tensions.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
Rasmussen (anthropology, U. of Houston) examines the interconnections between local health concerns, cultural survival and autonomy in contemporary Tuareg society. Coverage includes an overview of Tuareg culture, history and positioning within Niger; key ideas and practices in local healing such as the nature of power and knowledge- acquisition, its relation to symbolism and politics, and cultural values related to the practice of medicine; Tuareg ritual healing specialists in relation to cultural concepts of person and body in the local space; an exploration of Tuareg medicine as a semiotic system of communication; and the unifying notion of place in Tuareg medical/ritual healing. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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