Making Kedjom Medicine: A History of Public Health and Well-Being in Cameroon

by Kent Maynard

Overview

Conceptions of medicine and medical practice among the Kedjom peoples in Cameroon embrace more than western biomedical understandings of medicine. For these peoples, medicine implies substances, knowledge, practices and institutions bound up with protection and intervention against misfortune and the active promotion of well-being. Nor are medical concerns primarily about the individual. Medicine in the precolonial era was a matter for groups. In short, medicine was preeminently public. Perhaps the major transformation since the colonial period and extending into the postcolonial, has been the increasing commercialization of "traditional" medicine as African healers shift their practices away from group concerns to a focus more concerned with treating the individual. Written in a lucid style, full of vibrant anecdotes, Maynard's book will appeal not only to medical anthropologists and development workers, but also to anyone interested in nonwestern medicine and practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780325071183
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/11/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Kent Maynard

Table of Contents

Contents
Prefacevii
Acknowledgmentsxix 1
Who Makes Kedjom Medicine? 12Medicine in the Kedjom Moral Landscape 333
Defining Kedjom Medicine, Public Health, and Well-Being 1034
Colonial Preoccupations and Indigenous Culture 1715
Medicine and the Ambivalent Church 2236
The Shallow Tradition of “Traditional Doctors”2637The Moral Bases of Healing and the Rising Tide of the Market 3118
Conclusions: A History of Well-Being in the Grassfields 355
Glossary 381
Bibliography 385
Index 401