Stacey A. Langwick

Overview

I am a cultural and medical anthropologist. In addition to a PhD in Anthropology, I also hold a Master’s Degree in Public Health. At Cornell, I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses on the anthropology of medicine, the body, postcolonial science, toxicity, critical plant studies and Africa. 

My research focuses on healing, medicine and the body in East Africa. I work most extensively in Tanzania. My scholarship is broadly concerned with the politics of knowledge, questions of evidence, and possibilities of care. Most recently, I have taken up these themes through a range of interlocking issues including the science of traditional medicine in Africa, the afterlives of botanical colonization, the problem of toxicity, the politics of intellectual property, questions of bodily and territorial sovereignty, the work of chronicity and the rise chronic disease, and the possibilities of gardens as sites of epistemological and ontological experimentation.

Research Focus

All of my work has been deeply committed to ethnographic practice and to the kind of knowledge and engagement that is only possible through ongoing deep relationship with place over time. Yet the stakes of my arguments are not only local. My research examines the inseparability of bodies, politics, and ecologies in African healing practices, tracing how struggles over what constitutes health are simultaneously struggles over bodily threats, land relations, and the possibilities of care.

My forthcoming book, Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing and Sovereignty in a Toxic World, explores what it means to heal when the very practices of healing bodies, lands, and economies also undermine possibilities of future survival. To work through this double-bind, I argue for rethinking the nineteenth and twentieth century notions of toxicity and remedy that currently shape both medical and environmental science and law. This book unfolds through innovative work with Tanzanians who are challenging the ways that “health” conceptualizes and governs the entanglement of bodies and ecologies. The plant(ing) remedies they formulate work through the layered histories of healing in the region and unsettle the modernist settlement dividing medicine from agriculture. They kindle plant relations to intervene in the chronic injuries and relentless depletions that are rendered invisible when bodies and lands are maintained as separate objects of practice. The Kiswahili concept of dawa lishe—medicines that feed us—names these efforts to reinvent toxicity and its relation with remedy and memory through vocabularies forged in African histories of healing. Dawa lishe isn't about returning to a romanticized past, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments redefining health through projects that understand that human and ecological wellbeing are inseparable. In so doing, dawa lishe points to a more ecological body, broadens notions of reproductive justice, and experiments with the entanglements of bodily and territorial sovereignty. Medicines That Feed Us describes the slow violence of toxicity as a chronic thinning of the multispecies relations through which land and lineage continue and articulates fights over the futures of lushness as fights over the definition of health. 

My interest in questions of healing, the historicity of the body, the possibilities of care, and the politics of medicine started with my first book, Bodies, Politics and African Healing (2011). In this book, I attend to struggles over healing and the development of the modern category of “traditional medicine,” as struggles over ways of knowing and modes of embodiment that demarcate the material and immaterial, the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. I argue that any account of healing at the turn of the millennium must also be an account of the ontological politics catalyzed by missionization, colonization, and post-independence development. The ethnographic core of the book explores efforts by healers to generate 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 that these disease entities entail. I am attentive to the capacities, skills and relations that shape healers’ therapeutic engagements, formulate a distinctive version of the body as an object of healing, and render visible and tangible particular bodily threats. This attention to how bodies and threats are enacted through healing practices, along with my commitment to the healers and histories in this book, shaped my orientation toward the forthcoming book’s engagement with plant(ing) remedies and land relations.

Beyond these two sole-authored monographs, I also co-edited Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa, a volume which highlights the transnational circulation of medicines, technologies, experts, bureaucratic models and techniques of care in and out of Africa. My sole authored articles and essays have appeared in social science and humanities journals such as American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Osiris as well as a number of edited volumes. My collaborative work also extended into health journals such as International Journal of Hypertension and American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Most recently, I am exploring ways in which anthropology might inspire collectives that take seriously the provocation that healing is about land relations, in efforts to reimagine how medicine might attend to the chronic depletion and persistent injury of bodies forged through histories of dispossession and the forms of alienation that inhere in the economization of land, labor and life. I am drawn to experiments and collaborations that disrupt the body-land relations which inhere in histories of dispossession and inequality, by enacting alternative modes of existence and forms of liveliness. One such project I co-lead is the Uzima Collective—a group of scholars, public health specialists, clinicians, artists and community leaders in Tanzania and the United States. Uzima draws on indigenous forms of knowledge and local notions of health to rethink (bio)medicine’s land relations within a major teaching and research hospital in Tanzania. We argue that new ground – literally and figuratively – is needed to envision the healing of bodies and lands in the face of the dual environmental and health challenges. The collective has started by reinventing the role of the garden in the history of modern medicine. On a two-acre plot in the middle of the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (Moshi, Tanzania), the Uzima Collective is cultivating an anticolonial teaching, research, and healing garden and developing modes of land-based methods to address sickness, debility, depletion, and injury. We offer this garden as a site for medical training alongside the clinic, classroom, and laboratory as well as a space for patients, students and medical staff to seek repletion, inspiration, and healing.

In recent years, my work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Cornell Center for Social Sciences, the Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and Engaged Cornell.