Stacey A. Langwick

Overview

I am a cultural and medical anthropologist. In addition to a PhD in Anthropology, I also hold a Master’s Degree in Public Health. At Cornell, I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses on the anthropology of medicine, the body, postcolonial science, toxicity, critical plant studies and Africa. 

My research focuses on healing, medicine and the body in East Africa. I work most extensively in Tanzania. My scholarship is broadly concerned with the politics of knowledge, questions of evidence, and possibilities of care. Most recently, I have taken up these themes through a range of interlocking issues including the science of traditional medicine in Africa, the afterlives of botanical colonization, the problem of toxicity, the politics of intellectual property, questions of bodily and territorial sovereignty, the work of chronicity and the rise chronic disease, and the possibilities of gardens as sites of epistemological and ontological experimentation.

Research Focus

All of my work has been deeply committed to ethnographic practice and to the kind of knowledge and engagement that is only possible through ongoing relationship with place over time. Yet, this does not mean that the stakes of my arguments are only local. My first book, Bodies, Politics and African Healing, examines how healers in Tanzania are generating new ways of conceptualizing the body and bodily threats as they confront a changing therapeutic landscape, dominated by AIDS and malaria. Following traditional healers’ refusal to take the biological body in biomedicine as ahistorical and the materiality of threats as self-evident, Bodies, Politics and African Healing intervenes in what was referred to by some as the “ontological turn”; that is, the widespread exploration of existence—as well as ways of knowing—as multiple, negotiated, and as such caught up in the politics of contemporary life. In so doing, I tell a new story of colonialism and postcolonialism through the struggles of healers, nurses, doctors, and patients over what constitutes bodies and bodily threats in contemporary Africa. I also co-edited Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa, a volume which highlights the transnational circulation of medicines, technologies, experts, bureaucratic models and techniques of care in and out of Africa.

My second book Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing and Sovereignty in a Toxic World, examines the work of therapeutic-social-ecological projects that engage healing as land relations. I take these practices as legitimate locations from which to interpret and critique the dominant configurations of science, law and economy through which the ambivalence of the pharmakon is managed in the name of both “health” and “environment.” This requires pushing beyond the call to develop “theory from the South” in that it refuses to be restricted to the forms of speech and ways of thinking recognized as “theory” by the Global North. By asserting that theorizing is about how and with whom we gather, and that theory can be done through the work of caring for the soil and tending to plants, this book expands ideas of who is (already) theorizing, which conversations belong and can find traction in the academy, and how a vocabulary in service of equity, justice and continuance is generated. Writing Medicines that Feed Us invites readers to expand their commitments to alternative forms of bodily and territorial sovereignty through the speculative, evocative conceptual frames being generated in Tanzania.

Most recently, I am exploring ways in which anthropology might inspire collectives that take seriously the provocation that healing is about land relations, in efforts to reimagine how medicine might attend to the chronic depletion and persistent injury of bodies forged through histories of dispossession and the forms of alienation that inhere in the economization of land, labor and life. I am drawn to experiments and collaborations that disrupt the body-land relations which inhere in histories of dispossession and inequality, by enacting alternative modes of existence and forms of liveliness. One such project I co-lead is the Uzima Collective -- a groups of scholars, public health specialists, clinicians, artists and community leaders in Tanzania and the United States. Uzima draws on indigenous forms of knowledge and local notions of health to rethink (bio)medicine’s land relations within a major teaching and research hospital in Tanzania. We argue that new ground – literally and figuratively – is needed to envision the healing of bodies and lands in the face of the dual environmental and health challenges. The collective has started by reinventing the role of the garden in the history of modern medicine. On a two-acre plot in the middle of the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (Moshi, Tanzania), the Uzima Collective is cultivating an anticolonial teaching, research, and healing garden and developing modes of land-based methods for address sickness, debility, depletion, and injury. We offer this garden as a site for medical training alongside the clinic, classroom, and laboratory as well as a space for patients, students and medical staff to seek repletion, inspiration, and healing.

In recent years, my work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Cornell Center for Social Sciences at Cornell, the Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and Engaged Cornell.