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Healers and Empires in Global History

Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge

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  • © 2019

Overview

Editors:
  1. Markku Hokkanen

    1. Department of History, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

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  2. Kalle Kananoja

    1. African Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Explores how the hybridisation of medicine and the challenges between different forms of healing are recurrent features in the world’s medical cultures
  • Chapters cover understudied regions in the history of medicine, including the Arctic, Africa, the Caribbean, the Soviet Union and the Americas
  • Focuses on indigenous healers and examines how medical knowledge and materials were contested in various cultural settings

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (CIPCSS)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Healers and Empires in Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge

    • Markku Hokkanen, Kalle Kananoja
    Pages 1-26

  3. Traditional Arctic Healing and Medicines of Modernisation in Finnish and Swedish Lapland

    • Ritva Kylli
    Pages 27-53

  4. Reports on Encounters of Medical Cultures: Two Physicians in Sweden’s Medical and Colonial Connections in the Late Eighteenth Century

    • Saara-Maija Kontturi
    Pages 55-79

  5. Tibetan Medicine and Buddhism in the Soviet Union: Research, Repression, and Revival, 1922–1991

    • Ivan Sablin
    Pages 81-114

  6. Contestation, Redefinition and Healers’ Tactics in Colonial Southern Africa

    • Markku Hokkanen
    Pages 115-148

  7. Complicating Hybrid Medical Practices in the Tropics: Examining the Case of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1850–1926

    • Rafaela Jobbitt
    Pages 149-178

  8. Doctors, Healers and Charlatans in Brazil: A Short History of Ideas, c. 1650–1950

    • Kalle Kananoja
    Pages 179-201

  9. Risking Obeah: A Spiritual Infrastructure in the Danish West Indies, c. 1800–1848

    • Gunvor Simonsen
    Pages 203-237

  10. Toward a Typology of Nineteenth-Century Lakota Magico-Medico-Ritual Specialists

    • David C. Posthumus
    Pages 239-271

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 273-279
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Keywords

About this book

This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers’ engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readersthat ‘traditional’ medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world. 

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of History, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Markku Hokkanen

  • African Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Kalle Kananoja

About the editors

Markku Hokkanen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Oulu, Finland. His previous publications include the monograph Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859-1960 (2017) and the co-edited collection Encountering Crises of the Mind: Madness, Culture and Society, 1200s-1900s (2018). 



Kalle Kananoja is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published articles on precolonial Atlantic African and colonial Brazilian history.


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