Hybridising Medicine: Illness, Healing and the Dynamics of Reciprocal Exchange on the Upper Guinea Coast (West Africa)

Medical History

Volume 60, Issue 2, 1 April 2016, Pages 181-205

  (Review)

Havik, P.J. 

 

Unidade de Clínica Tropical, Fundação Para A Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical (IHMT), New University of Lisbon (UNL), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Rua da Junqueira, 100, Lisbon, Portugal 

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Abstract

The present article seeks to fill a number of lacunae with regard to the study of the circulation and assimilation of different bodies of medical knowledge in an important cultural contact zone, that is the Upper Guinea Coast. Building upon ongoing research on trade and cultural brokerage in the area, it focuses upon shifting attitudes and practices with regard to health and healing as a result of cultural interaction and hybridisation against the background of growing intra-African and Afro-Atlantic interaction from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. Largely based upon travel accounts, missionary reports and documents produced by the Portuguese Inquisition, it shows how forms of medical knowledge shifted and circulated between littoral areas and their hinterland, as well as between the coast, the Atlantic and beyond. It shows that the changing patterns of trade, migration and settlement associated with Mandé influence and Afro-Atlantic exchange had a decisive impact on changing notions of illness and therapeutic trajectories. Over the centuries, cross-cultural, reciprocal borrowing contributed to the development of healing kits employed by Africans and non-African outsiders alike, which were used and brokered by local communities in different locations in the region. © The Author 2016. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Author keywords

Guinea Bissau Region; Healing; Hybridisation; Illness; Knowledge; West-Africa

ISSN: 00257273 CODEN: MDHIASource Type: Journal Original language: English

DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2016.3Document Type: Review

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

References (136)

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  Havik, P.J.; Unidade de Clínica Tropical, Fundação Para A Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical (IHMT), New University of Lisbon (UNL), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Rua da Junqueira, 100, Portugal; email:philip.havik@ihmt.unl.pt
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