THEME STATEMENT
SUB-THEMES

The social and political dimensions of the health of Africans and of African systems of medical knowledge have frequently been examined by scholars and professionals. Metaphorical representations of health and illness in fiction and non-fiction also make reference to social and political concerns—as in anorexia associated with anomie depicted in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and as unhealed wounds associated with disorder in Wole Soyinka’s Open Sore of a Continent.  The 2005 ASA meeting theme will focus on health, knowledge and politics, broadly construed, from a range of perspectives, e.g., sociological, medical, economic, religious, historical, political, anthropological, literary, and legal.  It will also include metaphorical and moral representations of health and the body as well as different views  on the politics of health care and medical knowledge: colonial and postcolonial; global and local; gendered and generational.

Several broad themes will be considered.  The extent to which biomedical knowledge and practice has reinforced the power and control of colonial and post-colonial governments has been studied in a number of African societies.  While biomedical approaches based on Western medical models are pervasive, they nonetheless do not dominate African medical practice.  Medical pluralism, evident in many African societies, is seen in the range of health treatments available—traditionalist, naturalist, biomedical, and church-based—and in the continued importance of herbal and psychological health practices. This may be due, in part, to the continued benefits of indigenous African systems of medicine which some see as treating social and psychological health problems which Western biomedicine is unable to address.  Medical pluralism may also reflect the early introduction of Islamic systems of healing, the association of Western biomedicine with missionary-doctors (with its understandings of health and morality which are not shared by all Africans), and the fact that many public health programs were introduced during the late colonial period so that they never superceded extant knowledge and practices.

This pluralism of therapeutic practice also reflects another aspect of health, knowledge, and the body/politic in Africa, namely, the ways that impoverishment and poor-working conditions have affected African men and women, whose widespread incorporation in world economic systems as export commodity producers, as miners, and as day-laborers in building projects, contributed both to declines in their health and in their need for affordable therapies.  Whether this impoverishment—fiscal and physical—was due to economic policies and taxation during the colonial period or to trade imbalances and structural adjustment policies during the post-colonial period, the health of Africans has been affected historically by a range of political and economic practices and beliefs, including those held by colonial practitioners of Western biomedicine who sought to portray the so-called deterioration of African health as a maladaptive response to “modernization.”   More recent analyses of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in Africa, which may inadvertently reproduce colonial associations of sickness, sexuality, and race, suggest the pressing need to consider the ways that medical discourse has, in the past, and continues in the present to emphasize cultural difference, rather than historical and materialist factors, in explaining disease trajectories in Africa.  How the body—individually as well as in groups—in various states of health and illness has historically been viewed and treated in Africa reflects a range of political, cultural, social, ethical, economic, and legal concerns.

This point leads to another major theme concerning health, knowledge and the body/politic.  That the health of bodies is achieved not by default but rather reflects the efforts of individuals and communities, their knowledge, and national health programs is an obvious yet often over-looked observation.  In the face of present-day economic hardship, the provision of public health services by many African states has been undermined, with increases in childhood diseases, due to inadequate immunization, and in childbirth complications and maternal mortality, due to declining prenatal care. While the lack of public health care is being taken up by private health clinics, some of which offer excellent services, the high cost of private care has contributed to inequalities in health treatment. Yet despite these enormous difficulties, many Africans are managing to sustain their health, even under less than optimal conditions.  One of the ways that people are maintaining health, particularly when government services have been curtailed and private clinics are unaffordable, is through religious practices which have long been associated with health in Africa.  Traditional healing specialists often combine religious and psychological approaches, along with knowledge of herbal remedies, in treating illness. Along with missionary church hospitals established during the colonial period, more recent church clinics and faith healing hospitals also serve as an important source of cure. Aside from institutional sources which provide health treatments, African women and men’s everyday knowledge of hygiene—learned in primary and secondary schools—have also contributed to the ways that they can better care for themselves and their children. Along with these everyday health behaviors, some ritual practices have been revived to address contemporary health problems. Indeed, the knowledge of disease transmission has historically been expressed in a range of media, including depictions of deities and spirits in shrines, ritual performances, masquerades and dance, and more recently, in popular videos, and in educational announcements on radio and television which warn of health risks associated with certain lifestyles.

Another broad theme touched upon by these educational messages, particularly evident in the transmission and treatment of sexually transmitted infections such as HIV-AIDs, is the way that gender dynamics in African societies is also part of a discussion of health, knowledge and the body/politic.  That the transmission of STIs reflects a particular set of gender relations—e.g., familial, economic, and cultural—has been a primary area of investigation when examining the social and micro-political dynamics of health.  However, a consideration of how gender ideologies and ideas about sexuality, more generally, contribute to thinking about the susceptibility of men and women to particular types of illnesses—both physiological and psychological—affect the kinds of therapies used, might also be examined.  The physiological fact that women give birth  also underscores the point that there are different gender concerns regarding health.   Gender ideology and dynamics also come into play in clinical and hospital practice, when authority and knowledge are associated with Western-trained, male medical  doctors, underscoring the importance of understanding gender dynamics in unraveling the relationships of knowledge, power, and the politics of health in Africa.
How people define health and disease, how are these definitions relate to views of the body, and how certain bodies are associated with susceptibility or resistance to certain diseases have political and social consequences.  Thus, during the precolonial period, Africans viewed European bodies as susceptive to tropical diseases which prevented Europeans from penetrating the continent, while during the colonial period, Europeans portrayed African bodies as inherently unhealthy, an idea which was used to justify racial segregation.  Furthermore, how affliction itself has been conceptualized has had important implications for medical practice.  The types of public health interventions which are initiated may depend on whether an illness is explained as the result of specific or multiple causes affects.  Indeed, how bodies and the body politic are imagined and portrayed as healthy or as diseased have long had philosophical and ethical dimensions in Africa.  Philosophies of health and illness also inform aesthetic representations of the body as when concepts of beauty, bodily cleanliness, character, and health are conflated. Yet some practices associated with body beautification may be unhealthy.  The importation, manufacturing, and sales of carcinogenic skin-lightening creams have been banned by several national governments in an attempt to reduce their use by African women.  Less well-known products, including tablets and injections, are currently being advertised in popular journals and on websites to address a range of men’s “sexual dysfunction” problems, which also imagine an idealized male body.

Any consideration of health, knowledge, and the political contexts of cure in Africa must consider HIV-AIDs and its tragic consequences.  Research has been conducted on transmission and treatment programs, on government policies and actions, on AIDs education, and on health interventions in areas of southern Africa affected by the political legacy of apartheid, where huge disparities in wealth have contributed to poverty, hunger, and subsequently, the spread of HIV-AIDs.  With some exceptions, less work has been done on the relationships between environmental damage and HIV-AIDs, as in the Niger Delta where oil production has affected the fragile riverine ecosystem, with a subsequent loss of work for fisherwomen who consequently become involved in commercial sex work. While the introduction of antiretroviral drugs through NGO programs and pressures put on large pharmaceutical companies to allow the sale of generics in Africa have led to a greater availability of more affordable treatment, the workings of national treatment programs and the distribution of antiretroviral drugs are just beginning to be studied.  Furthermore, debates over the efficacy of local cures and trajectories of blame continue. Finally, the consequences of the disability and death of large portions of adult populations due to HIV-AIDs, particularly the effects on generational relations and health, has only recently been examined.  When there are communities without elders, what are the consequences for young people’s responsibilities, education, and support?

In discussing the consequences of the HIV-AIDs epidemic in Africa, it is important to remember that other diseases may be seen by Africans themselves as more immediate problems for their health and well-being.  Thus the decision of Western-based agencies to focus on HIV-AIDs and reproductive health may be seen as problematic, underscoring the politics of health care, while more pressing diseases such as malaria, measles, and yellow fever, continue to afflict Africans.  Who has the power to determine the agenda of health programs and how do fears of global transmission of particular diseases motivate health agendas, rather than community or country concerns?  Some NGOs and international foundations are addressing local problems, in programs that provide treatment for malaria and diabetes.  However, health economics has also affected people’s ability to participate in preventative health care and treatment programs.  Furthermore, the introduction of user-fees and the shift from horizontal health delivery systems such as primary health care to the vertical health delivery initiatives which focus on specific diseases may leave many without basic health care.

Another general theme concerning sociocultural and political dimensions of health in Africa is specifically related to civil war and other forms of violence.  Studies have considered psychological trauma resulting from the genocidal civil war in Rwanda as well as the psychological healing resulting from Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa and elsewhere.  The rehabilitation of war refugees, including how concepts of disability and pain affect ideas about healing, are issues which have also been addressed. While the use of new health technologies (NHTs) may ameliorate the health problems of some war victims and refugees, the poverty and inequality which underlies much of the social disorder in Africa also contributes to the unequal distribution of NHTs.  This particular form of inequality is exacerbated by the cost of some of these technologies. While access to web-based information may be an option for some, this, too, is largely restricted to cities or to areas with a well-maintained infrastructure.  Nonetheless, African medical professionals may bring equipment such as ultrasound, HIV-AIDs testing equipment, and CAT-scanning machines to establish clinics and to train medical technicians in their home countries, although largely to urban areas. How the importation of this technology has affected concepts of basic health care needs is less well known.

Finally, increasing emigration from the continent raises questions about health and the body/politics beyond Africa. As African medical personnel work in the Middle East, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, how are they transforming medical knowledge in these places? Similarly, what is the impact of African migrants on healthcare in their new homes?  How are their host societies accommodating different cultural practices, languages, and health problems associated with African immigrant populations?  Furthermore, the legal issues raised by immigration also warrant consideration, particularly during the era of HIV-AIDs, when countries are considering ways to restrict the movements of HIV positive individuals.  What are the legal and human rights implications of these policies?  Additionally, how are human rights concerns surrounding health used by aspiring African emigrants as the basis for seeking asylum in Europe and the United States and how are these cases affecting immigration law?
While the relationships between health, knowledge, and the body/politics in Africa is the conference theme, not all panels and papers need focus on these issues.  Papers and panels that explore these topics in comparative perspective, drawing on experiences from the African Diaspora, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, as well as contributions which examine fundamental topics in African Studies are also encouraged.
 

SUB-THEMES

A. Gender

B. Arts, Aesthetics, and Beauty

C. Politics of Human Rights and Violence

D. Knowledge, Measurement, Health Technologies, Internet MDs

E. Power, Politics, and Policies: Colonial/Neocolonial

F. Dangerous Diseases, Disabilities, and Pain

G. Health and Inequality

H. Production and Reproduction

I. Social Context of Health, Past and Present

J. Healing and Religion

K. Illness and Health in Literature

L. Legal, Public Policy and National Security Issues

M. Economies

N. Development and Education

O. Environment

P. Histories
 

A. Gender
Olufunke Okome, City University of New York-Brooklyn (mokome@brooklyn.cuny.edu)

The papers in this section will focus on the intersection of gender and health in African social and political systems and on the study of these phenomena from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives. They will document and explicate the ways in which ordinary people conceive of the gendered nature of health, disease, and healing; and examine popular and scholarly understandings of the social and political dimensions of health, disease, and healing in both indigenous systems of thought and externally-influenced African philosophies in medicine, political science, sociology, anthropology, law, literary analysis and criticism, and popular culture. The historical, generational, local, regional and global dimensions of the relationship between gender and health also ought to be problematized, and the discourses and analysis that shape these realities exposed to reveal their power in shaping a particular kind of social and political order through which boundaries are established, consequent upon the previous ordering of differences. What, for example, are the effects of the historical processes through which Western biomedicine with its own gendered connotations, came into Africa on the interplay between gender and health?  To what extent was expertise construed as gendered?  To what extent was there a difference in the gendering of expertise in indigenous as compared with biomedical therapies?  To what extent was access and quality of treatment shaped by gender?  To what extent did history repeat itself during the immediate postcolonial and contemporary period in terms of the construction of expertise, access to both biomedical and indigenous health care therapies, and belief in the efficacy of one or the other kind of therapy?  What are the cross-cutting effects of state policy, class, and in some parts of Africa, race, on access to and consumption of healthcare therapies?

These questions have always been important, but they are made more so by the persistence and even increase in the incidence of some diseases, and the emergence of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-AIDS, into pandemic proportions.  What are the effects of gender ideologies and dynamics on the prevention and treatment of such diseases?  What are the effects on assessments of which bodies are susceptible to infection, what therapies are effective, what resources are deployed to address identified issues and problems?  How do women’s reproductive roles and the constructions that surround them shape the nature, form, and content of indigenous and biomedical public health education?  In essence, who has power in the formulation, selection and dissemination of health care information and the selection and implementation of health care policies?  How have these relationships changed over time?  What are the social, economic, and political consequences of these changes?  What are the philosophical and ethical implications?  What are the effects of gender on the manner in which people experience these problems and fashion responses and solutions? Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

B. Arts, Aesthetics, and Beauty
Martha Anderson, Alfred University (fanderson@alfred.edu)

Scholars have revealed “the body” to be a complex entity, which can be defined variously in medical, religious, and political terms. An understanding of local notions of “the body” proves to be fundamental to the study of African expressive culture, because artistic representations can signify individual and/or corporate well-being, morality, and aesthetic beauty, and may even be thought to affect them. A broad spectrum of African arts, from power figures employed to restore an individual’s health to murals that address the global spread of HIV/AIDS, operates within the medical arena.  The body itself serves both as a site for art and as an artistic medium. Various art forms, including masquerades and shrine sculptures, embody—and sometimes control—otherwise nebulous spirits. Music, dance, and possession, which affect both the mental and physical state of the body, can transport people from the mundane to the sublime.

With its focus on aesthetics, health, and beauty, this section offers manifold possibilities for panels on the arts, which the following list of suggested topics does not begin to cover. How have the arts, including new media, contributed to the body of medical knowledge about the spread of diseases? How have African artists responded to health crises, whether cholera epidemics or substance abuse? How is “the body” defined in African art: are morality and aesthetics linked? What shapes African notions of the ideal body and have these responded to interaction with other cultures? Has recent scholarship on “the body” in Western culture affected the study of African art?  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

C. Politics of Human Rights and Violence 
William Reno, Northwestern University (reno@northwestern.edu)

The UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights includes the proposition that access to decent standards of health care constitutes a basic human right.  Violence and human rights abuses, on the part both of large organizations and more generally throughout societies, pose significant barriers to the realization of this goal.  In this general vein we are most interested in papers that (1) consider the broad impact of public health policies (or their absence) on the nature of violence and implementation of human rights, (2) the relationship between relative levels of violence and public well-being on public health policies, and (3) the proposition that concern for public health (on official and societal levels) is integrally connected to the promotion of human rights and the resolution of conflict.  Papers that include evidence from research are especially welcome.  Interdisciplinary panel proposals which examine the politics of human rights and violence will be greeted with great enthusiasm. Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

D. Knowledge, Measurement, Health Technologies, Internet MDs
Misty Bastian, Franklin and Marshall College (misty.bastian@fandm.edu)

The measurement of illness through a range of technological apparatus presents a particular form of knowledge of illness and disease which has implications for health care and who has the authority to provide it. This section will include papers that examine the use of various health technologies which incorporate measurement—from scales and thermometers to dialysis and scanning machines—as a means of constituting medical knowledge, of objectifying patients, and contributing to medical authority.  How, for example, has medical knowledge based on measurement and the utilization of a range of technologies—from injections to ultrasound—contributed to the power of medical workers to define health interventions. Also, by what processes is the measurement of health outcomes as reported in statistical studies privileged over non-clinical studies of illness and lived experience?  Furthermore, how have various forms of technology been taken up by traditional healers as a way of legitimating their authority and practice?  Papers which examine these questions and related issues, as well as the effects of recent access to the advice of international internet MDs by internet users in Africa (and the ways this advice has been used), are invited to participate.  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are also encouraged.
 
 

E. Power, Politics, and Policies: Colonial/Neocolonial
Toyin Falola, University of Texas-Austin (toyin.falola@mail.utexas.edu)
 
From the dawn of colonial age in Africa, and the introduction and institutionalization of Western biomedical approaches, there have been conflicts and compromises over the issues and meanings of sickness, health, and therapy.  These tensions were originally driven by the determination to provide health care to Africans as well as to the European settlers in the colonies.  The desire outlived colonialism and remains an important goal in postcolonial Africa. Critical in the health care debates, both in the colonial and postcolonial period, has been the question of how to set priorities, mobilize resources, and nurture health programs that prevent the outbreak of disease and/or, in the case of epidemics, respond to very diverse people in very different circumstances.   But setting priorities, allocating resources, and responding to the health needs of the citizenry are questions that are intimately tied to the issue of power, especially how it is owned, shared, and exercised in distinctive and multiple arenas, with a view to ensuring the successful implementation of health programs.

This section invites panelists as well as individual scholars to examine how, why and with what consequences hierarchies of power—formal and informal, both at the local and international levels—have shaped the evolution and development of health programs.  Theoretical analyses that combine debates and innovative ethnographic approaches in the study of health programs are encouraged.  This section is also interested in studies that compare and contrast past and contemporary health initiatives in rural as well as urban areas against the backdrop of shifting ethnic, racial, and regional identities.  Papers that analyze the application of indigenous knowledge, therapies, and institutions in specific contexts, as well as the appropriation of such knowledge and its subsequent  incorporation into mainstream health programs are also welcome.  Finally, the section welcomes a broad range of submissions that provide exciting insights into the interface of power and health in Africa.  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

F. Dangerous Diseases, Disabilities, and Pain
Julie Livingston, Rutgers University (jliving@tulrich.com)

From the pains of childbirth to the creaking bones of the elderly and the suffering brought by HIV/AIDS, dangerous disease, disability, and pain are fundamental bodily states. As such, they provide a rich set of symbolic references through which people make sense of ongoing changes in social, political, moral, and cultural life and the impact of these changes on the web of relationships through which resources and ideas flow.  Yet Africans must cope with a disproportionate share of these linked problems of disease, disability, and pain, complete with the moral, social, demographic, political, and economic challenges they pose for people in their attempts to marshal intellectual and practical responses to the vagaries of embodied life.  These states expose and test the links between self and society, the health and vigor of the social body, and relationships of care and community.  For this section we seek proposals that explore material or metaphorical aspects of these issues.  We welcome papers and panels that probe for example, the cancerous nature of political corruption, African interpretations or representations of the symbolic pain of the crucifixion, or popular debates about the crippling nature of debt.  Equally welcome are those papers and panels that take a more literal approach and address such questions as the role of corporal punishment in African education, the demographic or social ramifications of the emergent epidemic of cervical cancer, the politics by which certain diseases are labeled dangerous, or the impact of widespread amputations as a technology of war.  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

G. Health and Inequality 
Tola Olu Pearce, University of Missouri-Columbia (pearcei@missouri.edu)

For decades, the focus on health in Africa has been on the possibility of a transition from a heavy burden of infectious diseases to a lower one of chronic diseases with less health disparities. All this is yet to occur.

The sub-theme on health and inequality invites papers which focus broadly on the problem of health disparities at the micro (household), meso (community, province, state) and macro (national, regional and global) levels. We encourage entries that seek to go beyond “cultural deficiency” models to address historical, social, and structural factors that have influenced and still impact health outcomes, public policies, or community strategies. It is important to examine the dominant paradigms that have been used to explain inequalities in health.

With economic globalization, the concept of impoverishment has become more important than the term, “poverty,” and needs to be examined. In what ways are whole communities, or sections being relegated to specific economic niches with the growth of global capitalism, and what are the health implications? Local responses to economic globalization may have health impacts, in so far as locals are redefining rights and obligations to each other, the family, the nation/state and international/global institutions.

Methodological issues that interrogate the generation of knowledge about the health of sub-populations (children, women, lower income groups) can offer insights for policy development. Finally, papers focusing on the HIV/AIDS pandemic that cut across any of the issues enumerated above (or others), are relevant to this sub-theme. Of special interest is research that uncovers strengths in community, organizational and local programs, which now address AIDS, and may reduce disparities (e.g., gender and youth differentials).  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

H. Production and Reproduction
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Carleton College (pfeldman@carleton.edu)

Notions of fertility, generation, and regeneration are at the center of numerous African modes of thought and practice—from ritual systems and cosmologies, systems of governance, and family formation to agriculture and other economically productive activities. The health of the body politic is often conceived of in terms of its ability to reproduce itself socially as well as to (re)produce people. Focusing on both women’s and men's reproductive health, this section will attempt to bridge the too familiar dichotomy between production and reproduction.  When and where do the symbolism and figurative language surrounding male and female reproductive processes draw on ideas and imagery of productivity in other realms? What are the associations between reproductive health, fertility, and labor? How does contemporary and historical rhetoric regarding the body politic reflect reproductive ideals? How do they call up the specter of reproductive disruptions (e.g. infertility, hyperfertility, births out of place and time, miscarriage and abortion, as well as children lost to slavery and migration)? In what ways do changing enactments of male and female gender in African societies allow us to link productive and reproductive thought and practice? Panels are welcome that address these and related questions regarding production, reproduction, and health imagined broadly. Papers that also explore other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

I. Social Context of Health, Past and Present 
Nancy Rose Hunt, University of Michigan (nrhunt@umich.edu)

This section welcomes contributions from historians, anthropologists, and allies keen to rethink the state of the fields of health and healing studies within African social and cultural history, African medical anthropology, African medical history, and African historical anthropology of health, medicine, and the body. Since the 1970s, African studies has been notable within the history and anthropology of medicine for avoiding approaches that place disease, biomedicine, and health practitioners at the center of the analysis. This decentering of bodily disease has meant an openness to a range of therapeutic ideas and practices, including “cults of affliction,” religious movements, faith healing, and everyday forms of producing household health, without circumventing contextualization and political economy. With the imperial turn to medical history in the late 1980s and 1990s, however, scholarly attention has turned to power and the production of medical knowledge in colonial and postcolonial Africa and their effects on therapeutic practice, health work, creolized healing and religious forms, and new genders and subjectivities. The renewal of interest in witchcraft and its “modernities” in the 1990s has meanwhile decentered anew the biomedical, while fostering new work on power, violence, reproduction, and memory. This section’s panels will consider the state of productive tension among this range of approaches. It strongly welcomes new work suggesting various resolutions and fresh approaches, as well as position papers, historiographical takes, roundtables, and panel proposals with more than one discussant. The section organizer welcomes pre-proposal communications about possible themes, discussants, and innovations in the standard ASA panel format. Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are also encouraged.
 
 

J. Healing and Religion
Brad Weiss, William and Mary College (Blweis@wm.edu)

Considerations of the links between healing and religion have a long history in discussions of Africa.  Anthropologists and historians have long studied the significance of what were once known as “cults of affliction,” and many scholars have explored the role of both Muslim healing systems and missionary medicine in forging new modes of religiosity, and innovative understandings of health across the continent.  Today, new modes of religious practice, ranging from Islamic reform, to Pentecostalism, to disciples for the prosperity gospel have proliferated in many African communities, at the same time that rates of HIV seropositivity, levels of infant mortality, and the effects of both warfare and everyday violence have greatly expanded in recent years.  How have Africans and Africanists imagined the links between emergent religiosity and prevailing challenges to the body politic? What are the connections between these new forms of religious life and health crises? How might these novel interconnections be related to their historical connections in a range of African communities?

For this section panelists and individuals are invited to submit proposals that explore these and related questions from a variety of perspectives, including interdisciplinary ones.  These matters can also be pursued at both the micro and macro level.  Longitudinal studies of demographic transformation of nations and regions and their implications for participation in religious movements will be considered, as will work that examines changing conceptions of the body and healing in the wake of ritual innovation in “local” communities.  Investigations of the gendered dimensions of religious practice in the context of experiences of illness and affliction are especially welcome. Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

K. Illness and Health in Literature
Clement A. Okafor, University of Maryland-Eastern Shore (caokafor@mail.umes.edu)

The dogma of pathogenic causation of disease, which is the centerpiece of modern Western medicine, separates this regime not only from traditional African medical practice but also from its earlier Western antecedents. Concepts of modern Western medicine were introduced and privileged in colonial Africa through the agency of the schools and the medical institutions that were established at the time.  However, because these institutions were built largely towards the end of the colonial period, the ideas of modern Western medicine touched directly the lives of merely a small percentage of Africans.  More importantly, many—even among this small segment of the population—did not entirely accept the ideas of modern Western medical practice.  Hence, they continued to believe that certain diseases could be cured in the hospital, while others could be treated only by traditional medicine.  Thus there was a contestation of ideas relating to effective and appropriate medical practice even during the colonial era.  This competition has been heightened by the virtual collapse of the modern medical institutions triggered by the recent catastrophic demise of the economies of most independent African states.

These themes—of contesting medical paradigms, of accessibility of health care in the face of economic decline, and of enduring beliefs in the efficacy of traditional medical approaches—have been portrayed by a number of African writers, including Mariama Ba (on mental illness), Buchi Emecheta (on the lack of medical facilities in colonial Nigeria), and Chris Abani (on chronic illness associated with the urban poverty in Lagos). We welcome panels that explore the wide range of issues relating to illness and health, in either the oral or written literatures of Africa and the Diaspora.  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 

L. Legal, Public Policy and National Security Issues
Howard Stein, University of Michigan (howstein@umich.edu)

The duality and dependent nature of bodies as both personal and political domains invokes an array of relational issues. At the most fundamental level, there is the question of human rights broadly constituted. The legal recognition of an individual as a member of a body politic has been a defining element in the rights of access to public goods such as health care and the economic opportunities associated with livelihood and sustenance. Yet, in a number of African states, we have seen sudden shifts in the definition of human rights, even for long standing citizens where violence threatens the physical and mental health of entire communities. The frequency and ubiquity of conflicts have added to growing numbers of refugees, whose fluidity of movement has always been present around African borders which were imposed without regard to ethnicity or history. Furthermore, economic crisis has driven people to new countries, both within and outside of Africa, in search of survival. Those in charge of policy priorities of governments are torn between the public health and security implications of refugees and “illegal” immigrants without access to basic private and public goods and the need to maintain the integrity of the definition of citizenship. This problem has been exacerbated by the scarcity of public resources due to the protracted economic crisis and austerity imposed by the macroeconomic conditionality of international loans. National and international comparative case studies of the health implications of variations in immigrant and refugee policies are especially welcome.  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

M. Economies
Lillian Trager, University of Wisconsin-Parkside (trager@uwp.edu)

Recent research on the relationship of health and economy has emphasized several broad themes.  There have been portraits of the devastating consequences of specific diseases, especially HIV/AIDS, for local and national economies.  Other work has examined the debilitating effects of macro-economic policies, especially Structural Adjustment Programs, on national health systems and on individuals and families.  At the same time, researchers interested in social organization and community have analyzed “coping” or “survival” strategies utilized by African families, households, and communities as they respond to the varied health crises they face.

In what ways does recent scholarly work on the relationship of health and economy add to, or move beyond, these perspectives?  What have we learned about the relationship of health and economy, past and present, in specific locales and more globally?

This section calls for papers and panels that examine the intersection of health and economy in Africa from a wide variety of perspectives and in a variety of contexts. There are essentially two basic perspectives from which the health/economy relationship can be viewed: the effects of health on economic activity and economies, and the effects of economic activities and policies on health.  Papers using these perspectives can examine the health/economy intersection in a variety of situations, from specific local contexts to broader national, regional, and global ones.

This section especially welcomes panels and papers that consider health and economy in local contexts.  How do basic economic conditions, including poverty, access (or lack thereof) to good nutrition, safe water, and health care providers, affect the health of specific communities and populations?  Conversely, what is the effect of poor health and poor access to health care on local economies and communities?  Papers on the relation of women’s health and economic activities are of special interest.

At the same time, this section is interested in papers and panels that address health/economy interactions in national and international contexts.  How have policies, including macro- economic policies of governments and international organizations, affected health and health care? To what extent does the lack of government investment in basic infrastructure, such as water and sanitary facilities, lead to the declining overall health status in many countries?  What is the role of transnational corporations, especially the pharmaceutical industry, in shaping the overall health of people in Africa?  Does investment and interest in certain diseases and not others skew health outcomes?  Are there examples of companies that have ameliorated the health situation in particular locales?  Discussions of the economic impact of specific diseases have mainly focused on HIV/AIDS. However, malaria and other parasitic diseases, as well as infectious diseases also have potentially serious economic effects.  Papers are welcomed that examine the economic impact of such diseases. Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

N. Development and Education
Victor Agadjanian, Arizona State University (Victor.agadjanian@asu.edu)

Education and health care have always been significant themes in Africa’s development discourse, but their importance has been increasing in recent years. Health concerns are underscored and magnified by the HIV/AIDS pandemic; yet the HIV/AIDS crisis has also highlighted the persistent “traditional” health challenges that African populations face. In the education-development nexus, in addition to long-standing issues of coverage and instruction quality, a growing recent concern is about the widening digital divide that threatens to perpetuate Africa’s disadvantage in the new global economic order.

The health and educational predicaments of Africa’s development are further amplified by questionable neoliberal policies, widespread political instability, the seemingly inexorable decline of the African State and its retreat from the provision of social services. The modest achievements of the early independent decades are in increased jeopardy, and some education indicators show troubling signs of stagnation and even reversal.

Moreover, in the new structural environment internal disparities in health and education persist and are even growing. Depending on the setting, these disparities are shaped by a combination of social class, rural-urban, gender, ethnic, and religious differences. Rooted in colonial and post-colonial history, these disparities may have far-reaching implications for Africa’s future.

These papers and panels seek to address these issues and raise some of the following questions. How will Africa deal with these old and new challenges? What political frameworks and policy models in education and health care should be chosen and pursued? What successful national and local experiences can be identified and promoted?
Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

O. Environment
Rebecca Hardin, University of Michigan (Rdhardin@umich.edu)

Issues of the environment and health in Africa arouse concern in the West, in part due to prominent media images of the HIV-AIDS crisis, and increasing accounts of emergent diseases and viral agents, such as Ebola.  Yet such current events have complex environmental and social histories. They can be connected to the political and public health crises of the recent past, as when the late environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa alerted the world to the problems of oil pollution in the Niger Delta. Indeed, recent research has also linked the spread of HIV-AIDS with deforestation, environmental degradation, and the immuno-suppressing effects of organophosphate pesticides.  Nonetheless, African women and men live with less dramatic everyday environmental health problems such as exposure to high levels of lead from auto exhaust, chronic illness resulting from the contamination of soil and water sources from pesticides, as well as mercury poisoning from small-scale mining.  Far less is said about such issues in the international press.  We welcome papers and panels that consider such problems, as well as those which reflect more “mediatized” recent developments in the intersecting fields of development, environment, and health in Africa.  Examples might include: the changing roles of corporate and community actors in African health care access and related environmental management; studies which consider future directions for specialized and interdisciplinary work such as that between veterinary doctors and public health professionals on epidemiological challenges due to emerging zoonotic diseases; the increasing awareness of links between health and rampant violence and discrimination against school-aged women in African contexts;  and emerging approaches for studying correlations between civil conflict and infectious disease.  Finally, we would encourage panels exploring the contributions of internationally prominent activists and researchers on these issues, such as those of Wangari Maathai.  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.
 
 

P. Histories
Michel Doortmont, University of Groningen (m.r.doortmont@let.rug.nl)

Other sub-themes for this conference will attract investigations of specific aspects of Africa’s past; this section casts a more inclusive net by asking after the health of historical enquiry in and about Africa.  Historical scholarship on Africa has been strongly shaped by diverse and often contrary trends and intentions.  How have Africa’s histories held up to these stresses?  Both imperial and diasporan approaches, among others, impose different kinds of unity over African history; local, cultural nationalist, and post-modern approaches are among those stressing the particular, exceptional and divergent.  How can these approaches be integrated?  Much African history was once framed within an area studies model, but is now increasingly intersected by trans-regional thematic concerns, such as gender.  What remains of the intention to treat Africa as an historical space apart? How have African facts and stories resisted or accommodated modes of inquiry created largely in other places?  Have Africans been able to tell or write their own histories, faced as they are with powerful outside voices competing to define what is salient in Africa’s past?  How, for example, do the histories of slavery in Africa and of enslaved Africans outside Africa fit together?  How have once-dominant elite narratives, both internal and external, been challenged or reinforced by subaltern histories?  How do historians draw on other academic disciplines – such as linguistics or archaeology – and still retain a historical epistemology?  How does the conventional modern (progressive, linear) historiography relate to Islamic and/or oral modes of thinking historically?  This section welcomes especially papers which seek to assess the overall condition of Africa’s history, but also welcomes those which examine particular aspects of Africa’s past.  Papers that explore these and other disciplinary topics in African Studies are encouraged.