Borders, healers, politics: Brokering therapeutic sources in Zanzibar

• Applicant: Dr. Caroline Meier zu Biesen
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 266953613

This research project examines how after decades of “social modernization”, structural adjustment programs (SAPs), and political repression of traditional healing practices, the African state Zanzibar now advocates for greater integration of traditional healers in public health care. The project considers two major political events that triggered recent transformations of the traditional medicine sector: (1) Ministry of Health’s legally established standards for traditional therapeutic practices, which apply under the “Traditional and Alternative Medicine Policy Act”; (2) attempts by the non-governmental-organization “World Doctors” to assist Zanzibarian healers in performing their activities in accordance with governmental legislation. The NGO established institutional agreements with the Health Ministry to promote new forms of “collaboration” between the islands’ traditional and biomedical health care sectors.The project investigates how current political efforts to formalize traditional medicine transforms the role of healers and their relationship to structures of governance. It builds on anthropological research on boundary work, in particular on theoretical approaches to the problem of boundedness and flow in cultures of healing. Taking into account historical patterns of healing authority, the project furthermore explores traditional medicine within the theoretical concept of the “strategic resource”. Finally, the project analyzes how the mobilization of healers translates into medical practice, especially as a way to improve the management of non-communicable diseases (NCDs, here: diabetes/hypertension).A summary of preliminary research findings from qualitative research conducted over eight months between 2017 and 2019, as proposed in the original grant application is provided in this proposal (including methodology, empirical results, and their theoretical implications). Section 2 outlines the proposed areas of research during the second phase of this research opened up by the findings from the preliminary research. The second research phase will further analyze health-related situations of action as assemblages of health actors (especially healers), knowledges, resources, infrastructures, and policies, all moving across multiple scales. Research will focus on how these assemblages become contextually relevant, how they (potentially) produce novel medical conditions and, hence, how they shape the health of people in this island society. Specifically, the second research phase aims to explore how NCDs are connected not only with social, economic, and political conditions, but also with the biopolitics of disease categorization, epidemiological imaginaries, and a growing concern for environmental toxification.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants