Research Catalog

Details

Description

1. x, 248 pages; 24 cm

Summary

1. "Beginning with the colonial era, Western biomedicine has radically transformed African medical beliefs and practices. Conversely, in using Western biomedicine, Africans have also transformed it. The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange contends that contemporary African medical systems - no less "biomedical" than Western medicine - in fact greatly enrich and expand the notion of biomedicine, reframing it as a global cultural form deployed across global networks of cultural exchange." "The book analyzes biomedicine as a complex and dynamic sociocultural form, the conceptual premises of which make it necessarily subject to ongoing change and development as it travels the globe. David Baronov captures the complexities of this cultural exchange by using world-systems analysis in a way that places global cultural processes on equal footing with political and economic processes. In doing so, he both allows the story of Africa's transformation of "Western" biomedicine to be told and offers new insights into the capitalist world system."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

1. Medicine > Africa > History > 20th century
2. Medicine > Africa > History > 19th century
3. Africa
4. History, 20th Century
5. Anthropology, Cultural
6. Ethnology > Africa
7. History of Medicine
8. Medicine, African Traditional
9. History, 19th Century
10. Traditional medicine > Africa

Contents

1. 1. The Origins of African Biomedicine -- 2. Dissecting Western Medicine -- 3. Biomedicine's Civilizing Mission -- 4. African Pluralistic Medicine and Its Biomedical Antecedents -- 5. African Biomedicine.

Owning institution

1. Columbia University Libraries

Bibliography (note)

1. Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-239) and index.