Medicines That Feed Us

"Medicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that have shaped the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks: what does it mean to heal in a toxic world? Langwick proposes the Tanzanian phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, as a system of understanding how plant medicines can better align bodies with the earth. This conceptualization of medicine runs counter to Western medicine's conceptualization of health as separate from the earth and the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Rather than representing a return to "traditional" African healing, dawa lishe draws from both local and contemporary knowledges to craft a holistic approach to plant medicine, as well as its production, distribution, and administration. The practitioners and NGOs that Langwick follows offer alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing that acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health."--