Public Health and Spiritual Afflictions in Africa and the Diaspora

Boris Koenig is an FNRS postdoctoral fellow at UCLouvain and a former SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan (Department of Afroamerican and African Studies). He has conducted long-term ethnographic research in urban and rural Côte d’Ivoire since 2012. His current work examines the intersections of public health, spiritual healing, and the digital transformation of plural therapeutic worlds in Africa and its diasporas.

• Introduction: Reimagining Public Health’s Epistemic Infrastructures from the Lived Realities of Spiritual Healing 1. Affliction, Healing, and Everyday Religion: Perceptions of Well-Being, Ill Health, and its Remedy in Zanzibar 2. The Payment of Spiritual Debts as Restitution Among the Babanki of Northwest Cameroon 3. Kindoki, Institutional Legitimacy, and Public Health in the Lower Congo 4. Entrepreneurs of Grievances and Entertainment: Negotiating Social Contention and Healing in Mozambique 5. “Walking the Road to Death”: Perspectives on Cancer Causation and Interventions Among West African Immigrants in France 6. Spiritual Afflictions and Disagreements: Unpacking ‘Collaboration’ Between Community Psychiatry and Spiritual Healing in Rural Southwestern Ghana 7. Navigating Medical Pluralism: HIV/AIDS and Traditional Healing Practices in South Africa 8. Nganga and Public Health: How to Deal with the Ambiguities of Healing? 9. “Waganga Use Culture, Not Science”: Traditional Healing, COVID-19, and Epistemic Contestation in Tanzania 10. Debilitating Afflictions, Christian and Islamic Healing Centers, and the Reshaping of Public Health in Côte d’Ivoire Epilogue

"Public Health and Spiritual Afflictions in Africa and the Diaspora provides a nuanced look into the complex relationships between public health and a wide range of spiritual healing practices from across sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora. Never content to accept simple appeals to inclusion or collaboration at face value, the authors draw on detailed ethnographic cases to explore how epistemic legitimacy is produced and negotiated within and beyond institutional boundaries."China Scherz, Professor of Global Affairs, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, USA."A fascinating and profound set of cases written by a marvelous combination of starstudded and emerging scholars, Public Health and Spiritual Afflictions in Africa and the Diaspora reveals links of co-creation among belonging, exclusion, and public health structures in conditions of medical pluralism. Taking the social dynamics of spiritual insecurity seriously, it proposes new means to address epistemic dialogue among states, healers, patients, and kin, aiming to improve African and African-diasporic experiences of health and care by reshaping global health’s epistemic foundations."Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Broom Professor of Anthropology and Social Demography, Carleton College, USA.