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Zigua Medicine, between Mountains and Ocean: People, Performances, and Objects in Healing Motion

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Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World

Part of the book series: Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies ((IOWS))

Abstract

Being displaced from the control of some of the conditions of research by the people and events a scholar encounters in the “field” can generate transformative insights.1 To gain a deep familiarity with a community’s experiences, practices, and expressions calls for vulnerability,2 a social condition that arises from living with and listening to people and understanding the forms of story-performing that they deem valuable.3 During three years in northeastern Tanzania, I found that Zigua villagers who live in the coastal hinterland often employ healing performances to assuage traumas and disenchanting changes in their lives (many of them external in impetus). Healing draws from and treats all phases of community experience in a hermeneutic circle that enchains antiquity to the future.

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Notes

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  1. Jonathan R. Walz
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Anna Winterbottom Facil Tesfaye

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© 2016 Jonathan R.Walz

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Walz, J.R. (2016). Zigua Medicine, between Mountains and Ocean: People, Performances, and Objects in Healing Motion. In: Winterbottom, A., Tesfaye, F. (eds) Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567581_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567581_8

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56269-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56758-1

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