As an urban anthropologist, pastor and teacher the author has lived for many years among the Zaramo. This revised doctoral thesis is an important and well documented study of the traditional healers in the urban setting.

Against the background of the carving’s beginnings at Konde in Kisarawe District, Tanzania, which attest to the crucial ties between Zaramo social practices and the carved objects that form an integral part of Zaramo life, The Art of the Zaramo presents the transformations, and reinvention of Zaramo wood sculpture in line with forces of modernization and social change. The book confirms that art represents history, culture and society. To find answers to the author’s questions and to develop an understanding of how Zaramo figurative sculpture was transformed as it went through modernization, Fadhili Safieli Mshana compelled to consider the impact of the following: Zaramo multiple ethnic heritage, social norms and cultural patterns including Swahili interactions, the strategic proximity of the Zaramo to Dar es Salaam (Tanzania’s biggest city and former capital), influences of Islam and Christian missionaries, colonial history, and finally the socio-economic transformation of post-independence Tanzania. These involve examining the ways that art acts as a vehicle for the formation of individual/group identity; how the two entities negotiate each other in the process of social and cultural change. This excellent book then, is about the Zaramo and their figurative wood carving tradition, and it is written as an attempt to not only understand the origins, development, and centrality of this figural carving tradition to the Zaramo, but also, the ways the Zaramo have used select sculptural objects to interpret change and continuity in the midst of modernization and social change.

This title was first published in 2000. The essays in this volume explore the changing nature of family and gender relations in contemporary Tanzania. Particular attention is paid to the social construction of marriage and to the interplay of family life and gender relations with economic processes and forms of work. Many of the papers are based upon recent ethnographic and survey research; others provide a much needed historical perspective upon the change in family patterns and upon the ways in which gender and family relations are shaped by, and in turn help to shape, wider social institutions and processes.

The relationships between religion, spirituality, health, biomedical institutions, complementary, and alternative healing systems are widely discussed today. While many of these debates revolve around the biomedical legitimacy of religious modes of healing, the market for them continues to grow. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts: Healing practices with religious roots and frames Religious actors in and around the medical field Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition Boundary-making between religion and medicine Religion and epidemics Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including health and healing, religiosity, spirituality, biomedicine, medicalization, complementary medicine, medical therapy, efficacy, agency, and the nexus of body, mind, and spirit. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and medicine.

For international experts health is a comprehensive concept closely linked to bodily, material, spiritual and social well-being. But what does health mean to women living in a poor neighborhood of an African city? Women in Dar es Salaam see health as primarily related to livelihood, hygiene and care. To stay healthy one has to fulfill basic needs for food, water and shelter, to keep the body and home clean and to take good care of the family. Since the state and newly privatized services hardly reach them and husbands often fail in their role as breadwinners, women bear a growing burden in daily health practice. They become increasingly vulnerable, unless they manage to create a new balance by improving their knowledge, becoming economically more independent and raising support within the household, in social networks and organizations. By shifting the focus from illness to local meanings of health and vulnerability, anthropology can make a unique contribution to the rapidly expanding field of urban health research. Such an actor-centered approach provides fascinating insights and fosters innovative theoretical debates for both scholars and practitioners. With regard to medical anthropology, this study opens new lines of inquiry which may eventually lead to an anthropology of health.

From its modest beginnings in the mid-19th century, Dar es Salaam has grown to become one of sub-Saharan Africa?s most important urban centres. A major political, economic and cultural hub, the city stood at the cutting edge of trends that transformed twentieth-century East Africa. Dar es Salaam has recently attracted the attention of a diverse, multi-disciplinary, range of scholars, making it currently one of the continent?s most studied urban centres. This collection from eleven scholars from Africa, Europe, North America and Japan, draws on some of the best of this scholarship and offers a comprehensive, and accessible, survey of the city?s development. The perspectives include history, musicology, ethnomusicology, culture including popular culture, land and urban economics. The opening chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the history of the city. Subsequent chapters examine Dar es Salaam?s twentieth century experience through the prism of social change and the administrative repercussions of rapid urbanisation; and through popular culture and shifting social relations. The book will be of interest not only to the specialist in urban studies but also to the general reader with an interest in Dar es Salaam?s environmental, social and cultural history.

The Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. This interdisciplinary work presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era. The essays explore theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. This book will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.