Introduction. Histories of Healing

This special issue focuses on African healing the subject of a dynamic and relatively new interdisciplinary literature in African studies. Long a standard topic of evolutionary and functionalist anthropologists accounts so-called traditional medicine gained wider scholarly interest in the 1960s and 1970s with the growth of medical anthropology and the World Health Organisations Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 which supported the integration of TM into the health services of developing countries. Much early research in medical anthropology was fuelled by concerns about diseases as defined by western medicine in its biomedical or scientific forms. Nevertheless through their engagement with healers and their communities medical and social anthropologists and a growing number of historians raised important questions about biomedical disease categories and produced accounts that began to place African and European concepts of health illness and biology in specific historical and cultural contexts. Meanwhile the disciplines of science studies and history of medicine had also begun to situate the concepts used by European science and medicine historically and culturally unseating taken-for-granted notions of their rationality and universal application. This special issue brings together scholars from both of these fields to examine African healing focusing particularly on the transformation of its practices in the societies of southern Africa and in diasporas of healers from Africa to the Caribbean and from South Asia to Africa. (excerpt)

African studies · Declaration · Diaspora · Medical anthropology · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Law

• South African traditional healers’ approaches to mental illness

  Open Access•Daniel Lesiba Letsoalo•E-Journal of Humanities Arts and…•2026

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• Introduction to Special Issue

  Open Access•Ruth J Prince, Ruth Prince et al.•Africa Today•2009

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• Voices of African Traditional Healers

  Lisa Lopez Levers, Lynne Radomsky et al.•Journal of Psychology in Africa•2009

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