"Medicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that have shaped the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks: what does it mean to heal in a toxic world? Langwick proposes the Tanzanian phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, as a system of understanding how plant medicines can better align bodies with the earth. This conceptualization of medicine runs counter to Western medicine's conceptualization of health as separate from the earth and the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Rather than representing a return to "traditional" African healing, dawa lishe draws from both local and contemporary knowledges to craft a holistic approach to plant medicine, as well as its production, distribution, and administration. The practitioners and NGOs that Langwickfollows offer alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing that acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health."--
Medicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine’s intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Dawa lishe is not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants. Medicines That Feed Us offers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.
Through an ethnography of plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that shape life in the twenty-first century.
