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This study examines the legitimation of power and knowledge in the struggle of public health and health care agencies in the Lower Congo region of the Democratic Republic of Congo to vanquish chronic tropical diseases. Of particular interest is the creation of alternative institutions following the collapse of state sponsored structures and supply lines in the 1980s and 1990s, and the process by which such alternative structures are legitimized. A review of legitimation theory suggests that new paradigms are required to assess the nature and efficacy of diverse non-state institutions within a fluid global neo-liberal context. The paper argues that these new or newly adapted post-state institutional arrangements, born in the crisis of state failure, may be effective in the lessening of the disease burden that weighs on the region to the extent that they are able to muster the legitimacy of the populace, the professions, the national society, and the wider international community. I thus hope to shed light on the paradox of persistent tropical diseases — e. g., malaria, sleeping sickness, and schistosomiasis, as well as seasonal grippe, typhoid fever, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS — as endemic or seasonal scourges, despite their being understood by local specialists, with known treatments and public health measures to control them.

Specifically, this collection was assembled for two engagements during the author's sabbatical during the Spring semester, 2004. The first was a set of lectures at Harvard University in connection with a consultancy at the African Studies Program there. The second engagement was a six-week short term course at the Medical University of Vienna, in Austria. In this connection the author was able to make a two week trip to the Sudan, and to study Sufi sheik-healers. Some of the essays were also given by the author at other conferences, or reflect additional thinking for such venues. The collection then became a textbook in the author's course Anthropology 461/761 "Introduction to Medical Anthropology" at the University of Kansas. ; The slides were prepared to accompany some of the lectures of Representations, Ritual, and Social Renewal. They are numbered to correspond to the appropriate chapter in the text. Words or phrases in bold in the text identify images in the presentations. ; The essays in this collection reflect the author's thinking about sickness, health, and healing in Central Africa in the early years of the 21st century."Representations, ritual, and social renewal" encapsulates a perspective on Africanist medical anthropology that is sensitive to how issues of disease, health and healing are seen, communicated, symbolized; how they are situated in concrete behaviors and political-economic structures and conditions that affect health; and how they are engaged by common people, specialists, and leaders in projects and endeavors to ameliorate health. Although the setting of most essays is in the Kongo region of Western Equatorial Africa (the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Angola, and southern Republic of Congo-Brazzaville), where the author conducted much of his fieldwork, some topics have a wider sweep, such as: the verbal cognates of Bantu-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa, and the sub-continental distribution of some institutions and concepts; the environmental settings for therapeutic traditions in ...

Healing Makes Our Hearts Happy: Spirituality and Cultural Transformation among the Kalahari Ju/'hoansi. Richard Katz. Megan Biesele. and Verna St. Denis. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1997 214 pp