Afro-Atlantic healing practices

Abstract

This chapter explores the social relations and cultural meanings and experiences of healing and suffering in the exceptional circumstances of Atlantic modernity. It approaches the early modern and modern Afro-Atlantic as a field of exchanges and cross-fertilization. Instead of assuming medicine to be a European invention exported to the New World as part of the ‘civilizing mission’ of the empire, the chapter follows the movement of people, knowledge, and resources that have shaped what has become understood as modern medicine and healing. It focuses on mobility, diversity, and violence as specific to suffering and healing in the Atlantic world. Another central theoretical concern is the ontology of healing. The chapter looks into complex notions of personhood and relational subjects—healers, spirits, and patients—who complicate notions of orthodoxy and purity as well as racial or religious boundaries. In the healing practices of relational subjects, biomedicine does not appear as an independent modality of healing against ‘alternative,’ popular healing traditions. This problematizes the analytical framework of medical plurality, which implies separate, autonomous systems of medicine. Equally importantly, anthropological research on ontologies of healing calls into question the simplistic racialization of medical systems, as well as terms like Afro-Atlantic.