The Problem of Money: African agency and Western medicine in northern Ghana, by Bernhard Bierlich

Abstract

Bierlich's ethnography deals with Dagbon society in northern Ghana from the perspective of medicine and money. The study's focus is on modernity and its argument addresses the question of how the process of monetization affects society, particularly the ideas and practices surrounding morality, health, and health care. The author carried out the bulk of his research in the area in 1990 and 1991, and did follow-up studies in 1995, 1996, and 1997. The first five chapters of the book could be read as a long and ethnographically rich introduction to the last three chapters. Those first chapters deal with: Dagbon society in general (1), kinship and personhood (2), concepts of health and illness (3), the plurality of medicines (4), and medical knowledge and practice (5). In Chapter 6, Bierlich discusses contrasting and intertwining aspects of wealth, health, and magic. For example, he uses the example of the lottery game to draw parallels between people's struggles with the insecurity of material well-being and with the uncertainty of health. Men's fascination with the lottery is a case study in the response to modernity. The activities of ‘lottery teachers’ and local healers have remarkable similarities. Bierlich insists that the magic of the lotto game is not a return to pre-modern thinking but an ‘attempt to locate meaning and prosperity in a modern, postcolonial world characterized by monetary forms and global market economies’ (p. 125). Magic, in other words, is not banned by modernity but is part of it.