Only Women Know Trees: Medicine Women and the Role of Herbal Healing in Tuareg Culture

Abstract

In anthropology, there has been concern with mediating figures--African griots, hunters, and smiths/artisans--and other ritual specialists, who tread across natural and cultural boundaries, and negotiate different social interests. There has also been concern with traditional healers and alternative medical systems--for example, herbalism and midwifery--and their cultural survival in confronting established medicine, official religion, and nation-state politics. This article examines the role of herbal medicine women among the Tuareg, a seminomadic, socially stratified, Islamic people in the Republic of Niger, West Africa. Contemporary descent and inheritance forms include pre-Islamic matrilineal influences alongside the patrilineal influences of Islam. Of particular interest here is the relationship between herbal medicine women and Islamic scholars, with whom they work closely in their healing specialties, as mediators and facilitators. I show how herbal medicine women, in their herbal and psychosocial healing of women's gynecological and marital problems, negotiate wider contradictions and conflicts in Tuareg society. I argue that, in order to avoid challenging male Islamic authorities, women herbalists/healers must keep a low profile and accept a specialized niche. They negotiate, but also transform and reinterpret, a series of dynamic, contested spheres in Tuareg culture and society. I examine how far these roles result in medicine women's own marginalization and also sometimes compromise the interests of Tuareg women in disputed issues of fertility, descent, relatedness, and ownership. I conclude by discussing the implications of medicine women's strategic preservation of their roles for the future of Tuareg herbal healing and its predominantly female clientele.