Medicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine’s intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Dawa lishe is not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants. Medicines That Feed Us offers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.

Stacey A. Langwick is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, author of Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania, and co-editor of Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing.

Introduction. Healing (in) a Toxic World  1
1. Futures of Lushness  47
2. Efficacy of Appetites  77
3. Registers of Knowledge  117
4. Work of Time  159
5. Properties of Healing  193
Conclusion. Therapeutic Sovereignty  225
Acknowledgments  237
Notes  243
Bibliography  263
Index  287