Stacey Langwick
I am an anthropologist of medicine, healing and the body with a focus on East Africa.
My first book Bodies, Politics and African Healing examines how healers in Tanzania are generating new ways of conceptualizing the body and bodily threats as they confront a changing therapeutic landscape dominated by AIDS and malaria – and all the circulating technologies, inscriptions, bodies, experts, policies, bureaucratic formations and ethical regimes these disease entities entail. In this work, I attend closely to the ontological politics of healing in Tanzania (that is, struggles of who and what constitutes the realm of the real).
I am currently working on two research projects. The first -- Medicines that Feed Us: Plants, Sovereignty and Healing in a Toxic World -- accounts for the rise of a new form of therapy in Tanzania, referred to by some as dawa lishe, or nutritious medicines. This emergent field of practice reorganizes relations between agriculture and medicine in order to articulate the threats to well-being that structure the contemporary moment and to experiment with responses. Through it Tanzanians explore: what forms of vitality, of growth, are possible today? Who and what can grow ampler and more vital in Tanzania and how? I examine how dawa lishe translates and (re)configures notions of medicine, property, chronicity and crisis that are fundamental to global health. I argue that in the process of exploring that which is required to sustain, to endure, and to thrive, Tanzanian herbal producers are articulating a politics of habitability.
I am also the lead faculty member for the Qualities of Life working group in the Mario Einaudi International Studies Center at Cornell and a co-organizer of the Ecological Learning Collaboratory.
In recent years, my work has been funded by the American Council of Learned Scholars (ACLS), National Science Foundation (NSF), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Institute for Social Sciences at Cornell and the Einaudi Center for International Studies. As a Mellon New Directions Fellow, I studied intellectual property law (2011-2012) with particular interest changing regimes of property in relation to plants and therapeutic knowledge.
Address: 260 McGraw Hall
Department of Anthropology
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
My first book Bodies, Politics and African Healing examines how healers in Tanzania are generating new ways of conceptualizing the body and bodily threats as they confront a changing therapeutic landscape dominated by AIDS and malaria – and all the circulating technologies, inscriptions, bodies, experts, policies, bureaucratic formations and ethical regimes these disease entities entail. In this work, I attend closely to the ontological politics of healing in Tanzania (that is, struggles of who and what constitutes the realm of the real).
I am currently working on two research projects. The first -- Medicines that Feed Us: Plants, Sovereignty and Healing in a Toxic World -- accounts for the rise of a new form of therapy in Tanzania, referred to by some as dawa lishe, or nutritious medicines. This emergent field of practice reorganizes relations between agriculture and medicine in order to articulate the threats to well-being that structure the contemporary moment and to experiment with responses. Through it Tanzanians explore: what forms of vitality, of growth, are possible today? Who and what can grow ampler and more vital in Tanzania and how? I examine how dawa lishe translates and (re)configures notions of medicine, property, chronicity and crisis that are fundamental to global health. I argue that in the process of exploring that which is required to sustain, to endure, and to thrive, Tanzanian herbal producers are articulating a politics of habitability.
I am also the lead faculty member for the Qualities of Life working group in the Mario Einaudi International Studies Center at Cornell and a co-organizer of the Ecological Learning Collaboratory.
In recent years, my work has been funded by the American Council of Learned Scholars (ACLS), National Science Foundation (NSF), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Institute for Social Sciences at Cornell and the Einaudi Center for International Studies. As a Mellon New Directions Fellow, I studied intellectual property law (2011-2012) with particular interest changing regimes of property in relation to plants and therapeutic knowledge.
Address: 260 McGraw Hall
Department of Anthropology
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
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Books by Stacey Langwick
Articles and Book Chapters by Stacey Langwick
https://culanth.org/articles/968-a-politics-of-habitability-plants-healing-and
to commercialize and manage modern traditional medicine in Tanzanian universities, government laboratories,
nongovernmental clinics, and ministry offices. I argue that struggles over the practices that constitute the public to
which contemporary traditional medicine will appeal are also struggles over who is obliged to respond to pain and
debility, to mediate the consequences of misfortune, and to take responsibility for the inequalities that shape health
and well-being. Postindependence and socialist dreams had cast traditional medicine as the basis of an indigenous
pharmaceutical industry and promised freedom from multinational pharmaceutical companies and global capitalism
more broadly. By generating new publics, current scientific efforts to exploit the therapeutic and commercial value of
therapeutic plants are experimenting with political and social philosophies, with biological efficacy, and with new
forms of wealth and property. The uneven, contradictory, and partial projections of the public at play in these efforts
are raising thorny questions about the forms of sovereignty that are possible within the neoliberal restructuring
Essays by Stacey Langwick
Talks/Lectures by Stacey Langwick
https://culanth.org/articles/968-a-politics-of-habitability-plants-healing-and
to commercialize and manage modern traditional medicine in Tanzanian universities, government laboratories,
nongovernmental clinics, and ministry offices. I argue that struggles over the practices that constitute the public to
which contemporary traditional medicine will appeal are also struggles over who is obliged to respond to pain and
debility, to mediate the consequences of misfortune, and to take responsibility for the inequalities that shape health
and well-being. Postindependence and socialist dreams had cast traditional medicine as the basis of an indigenous
pharmaceutical industry and promised freedom from multinational pharmaceutical companies and global capitalism
more broadly. By generating new publics, current scientific efforts to exploit the therapeutic and commercial value of
therapeutic plants are experimenting with political and social philosophies, with biological efficacy, and with new
forms of wealth and property. The uneven, contradictory, and partial projections of the public at play in these efforts
are raising thorny questions about the forms of sovereignty that are possible within the neoliberal restructuring