Event location
Seminar will take place at Eilert Sundts hus, ninth floor, room 929, 14:15-16:00.
This particular talk is jointly organized with the African anthropology seminar group.
Abstract
What does it mean to heal in a toxic world? How is that which counts as “therapeutic” shifting with the growing acknowledgment that the extractive relations fueling contemporary economies and that animate modern life undermine possibilities for future survival? In Tanzania, this double-bind defining our contemporary moment is forging creative responses that reimagine the territorial and the corporeal, posing configurations of care that invite alternative forms of sovereignty in the service of both ecological and bodily healing. Social-therapeutic projects are challenging the ways that “health” conceptualizes and governs the entanglement of bodies and ecologies. In this talk, I think with a particularly charismatic banana, kitarasa, to reveal the tensions between the economic and the ecological, as it is caught up in efforts to heal land and bodies. Kitarasa has emerged as a key player in both entrepreneurial and nongovernmental experiments striving to heal bodies and soils in a world where that which enables survival in the near term, undermines it for future generations. Articulating the efficacy of kitarasa, and the social-therapeutic projects in which it is entangled, requires decentering 19th and 20th articulations of toxicity and its relation with remedy. I tell the story of Dorkia Enterprises, a small business, working to commercialize kitarasa flour as a “therapeutic” food. Their efforts are animated by connections to international food sovereignty initiatives to reimagine the scalar work of economy and disrupt the forms of property on which it depends. I move between (1) Dorkia Enterprises’ work to elaborate kitarasa through partial engagements with the state and the market and (2) an effort to think with kitarasa and the liveliness in its insistent excesses of these logics. As it folds the scales of bodies and lands into one another, kitarasa incites the theorizing of relations among toxicity, healing, and memory.
Bio
Stacey Langwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She is author of Bodies, Politics and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (2011) and co-editor of Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa (2012). Her second sole authored book Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing and Sovereignty in a Toxic World is forthcoming from Duke University Press. This latest book has led to a collaborative international design project in a major teaching-research hospital in Tanzania that invites a rethinking and reworking of healing on and of the planet in the face of climate change. Uzima: Wellness has begun with the cultivation of a teaching, research, and healing garden that reimagines medicine’s land relations. The land-based pedagogy emerging from this project offers the garden as a as a central site of medical training, together with the clinic, classroom, and laboratory. Prof Langwick teaches classes on medicine and healing, the body and bodiliness, toxicity, postcolonial science, critical plant studies and anthropological methods.