Stacey Langwick

Devils, Parasites,and Fierce Needles: Healing and the Politics of Translation in Southern Tanzania:

In Tanzania, the encounter between a traditional malady called degedege and the modern malady malaria is a fight to participate in the making of the bodies of women and children as well as the agents that afflict them. In their respective settings,degedege and malaria are considered two of the most common threats to the well-being of pregnant women and their young children. Local, national, and international public-health concerns for the early treatment of malaria compel biomedical practitioners to claim that degedege is malaria. This article explores the power of this translation through an examination of the processes involved in treating degedege and the processes involved in treating malaria. I examine what is gained and what is lost through scientific or public health efforts to translate concepts, objects of practice, and agents of affliction from one form of care to another.

From Non-Aligned Medicines to Market-Based Herbals: China's Relationship to the Shifting Politics of Traditional Medicine in Tanzania

The institutionalization of traditional medicine in Tanzania reveals how strategies for socialist liberation are morphing into strategies for neoliberalization. In the 1960s and 1970s, traditional medicine promised the raw material for the scientific development of an indigenous pharmaceutical industry. At the turn of the millennium, however, traditional medicine has re-emerged in Tanzania as a new path into the fast-growing global herbals market. Tanzanias relationship with China has been central to these dynamics. Development programs rooted in socialist friendship trained Tanzanian doctors in China throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. These practitioners forged Tanzanian efforts to develop and modernize traditional medicine. In this article, I look with particular detail at one woman who was chosen to start the Office of Traditional Medicine in the Ministry of Health in Tanzania, in order to elaborate the continuities and discontinuities central to the emerging field of market-based traditional medicines.

Partial Publics: The Political Promise of Traditional Medicine in Africa

This essay examines how the publics of public health and those of public domain are reshaping one another in efforts to commercialize and manage modern traditional medicine in Tanzanian universities, government laboratories, nongovernmental clinics, and ministry offices. I argue that struggles over the practices that constitute the public to which contemporary traditional medicine will appeal are also struggles over who is obliged to respond to pain and debility, to mediate the consequences of misfortune, and to take responsibility for the inequalities that shape health and well-being. Postindependence and socialist dreams had cast traditional medicine as the basis of an indigenous pharmaceutical industry and promised freedom from multinational pharmaceutical companies and global capitalism more broadly. By generating new publics, current scientific efforts to exploit the therapeutic and commercial value of therapeutic plants are experimenting with political and social philosophies, with biological efficacy, and with new forms of wealth and property. The uneven, contradictory, and partial projections of the public at play in these efforts are raising thorny questions about the forms of sovereignty that are possible within the neoliberal restructuring.

Herbal and Alternative Medicine Use in Tanzanian Adults Admitted with Hypertension-Related Diseases: A Mixed-Methods Study

Background Hypertension is increasingly common in sub-Saharan Africa where traditional medicine use is also common. We conducted a hospital-based, mixed-methods study to determine prevalence, pattern, and correlates of herbal and alternative medicine use in Tanzanian adults hospitalized with hypertension. Methods A standardized questionnaire was administered. In-depth interviews were performed on a subset of participants. Factors associated with herbal medicine use were determined by logistic regression. The association between traditional medicine uses and allopathic medication adherence was determined using ordinal logistic regression. Qualitative data were analyzed according to grounded theory. Results Of 213 adults enrolled, 52 (24.4%) reported using herbs during the previous month and 47 (22.1%) reported concurrent use of herbs and allopathic medicines. Lower educational level, nonprofessional employment, and lack of health insurance were significantly associated with herbal medicine use. Alternative medicines use was not associated with lower medication adherence. Qualitative interviews identified several important themes including reasons for herbal medicine use. Conclusion The use of traditional medicines is very common among patients with hypertension. Adults from low socioeconomic status, those with misunderstandings about hypertension, and those without health insurance were more likely to take herbs. Open, nonjudgmental communication between healthcare workers and patients regarding use of traditional medicines must be encouraged in Africa.