Abstract
Traditional healing in Tanzania is undergoing subtle yet consequential transformations as digital technologies increasingly shape how care is sought, delivered and understood. This talk draws on one year of ethnographic fieldwork including the collection of hundreds of promotional messages from healers, followed by longitudinal engagement with 20 practitioners and in in-depth study of 12 to examine how do traditional healers experience and makes sense of digital technologies in their therapeutic practice. The finding highlights that mobile phones have emerged as more than communication devices; they function as a healing tool, enabling remote consultations, diagnostic interpretations, ritual instructions and the circulation of healing narratives. Drawing on the theories of technological mediation and the idea that devices can become actors within healing assemblages, I explore how mobile phones reshape the relationships between healer, client, and spiritual forces while also generating tensions between tradition, secrecy and modernity.
I further examine the ambivalent terrain of digital engagement. Many healers use phones to extend their therapeutic reach, cultivate trust, and participate in competitive medical marketplaces, yet others resist these tools, seeing them as incompatible with ritual authority or moral conduct. These dynamics reveal both new possibilities and vulnerabilities, including misinformation, client skepticism, platform surveillance, and altered rhythms of care. WhatsApp groups have also emerged as informal knowledge-sharing networks, allowing healers to exchange techniques, diagnoses, and spiritual insights, reshaping collective learning and professional identity. The talk concludes by showing how digital technologies are not merely added to healing but actively reconfigure it, producing new forms of visibility, authority, and uncertainty within Tanzania’s plural therapeutic landscape.
Bio:
Dr. Vendelin Tarmo is a Tanzanian anthropologist and Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Dar es Salaam. He holds degrees from UDSM, the University of Bergen, and a PhD from the University of Basel. His research spans ageing, health and care systems, digital health and AI, youth and SRHR, displacement, poverty, livelihoods, gender, environmental health, and social protection, with recognised expertise in Risk Communication and Community Engagement during health emergencies. Vendelin has served as a consultant to WHO and the Ministries of Health in Tanzania Mainland and Zanzibar on outbreak response, vaccine demand creation, and infodemic management. He has widely published on themes such as community health systems, resilience, social protection, digital technologies in healthcare, ageing and care, and the social dimensions of pandemics, and has supervised numerous postgraduate students across anthropology and development studies
This talk is part of the project Bits, Bytes and Bodies: Local Innovation and Digital Healthcare in Tanzania, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
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