A Cornell anthropologist will discuss her new book on the relationship between plants, food and healing at two upcoming Ithaca events, drawing on work with community organizers and farmers in Tanzania.
Stacey Langwick, a professor of anthropology, is scheduled to speak at The Soil Factory on Oct. 18 and at a Nov. 4 campus event, according to a Cornell Chronicle interview. The October talk is co-sponsored by Buffalo Street Books; the November event is sponsored by Cornell’s Einaudi Center for International Studies and Institute for African Development. The announcement did not provide start times.
Langwick’s book, “Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World,” examines Tanzanian efforts to think about health alongside soil, farming, food and the environment. It is an anthropological account of those projects, not a clinical finding that a particular tea or plant remedy treats disease.
A phrase connecting food and medicine
The book uses “dawa lishe,” a Kiswahili phrase Langwick translates as “medicines that feed us.” She credits Helen Tibandebage Nguya, executive director of the Tanzanian organization Training, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation for Gender and AIDS, with proposing the phrase during a visit to a garden the group had helped establish at an orphanage west of Arusha.
Langwick described the garden as a place where children picked greens for meals while organizers discussed soil and seedlings with its gardener. Their conversation afterward connected nourishment to care for depleted land and bodies, she said. In the book, the phrase names work that crosses the usual divisions among medicine, agriculture and nutrition.
The Chronicle interview opens with a lemongrass tea made by two women near Mount Kilimanjaro. Its label promises to cleanse the body of toxins. Langwick said the women do not present the tea as a miracle cure; she treats it as an example of how people respond to concerns about chemicals, farming and everyday life. The label’s health promise is not established by the interview.
Projects do not call for abandoning treatment
The projects Langwick describes include gardens, seed sharing, indigenous crops, plant-based remedies and community farming practices. She argues that those activities can be understood as part of care rather than as separate from it, while cautioning that plant remedies are not automatically safe or beneficial.
Langwick explicitly said the people in her book do not urge anyone to abandon modern medicine. Nguya’s organization, for example, supports people continuing antiretroviral treatment, she said. Nor do the projects assume people can stop eating all commercially produced foods.
Her larger question is how communities respond when farming, medical care and other practices they depend on can also carry environmental or health costs. She described that as a question about sustaining relationships among people, plants and land, rather than seeking a world free of all possible harm.
Before the Ithaca appearances, Langwick is scheduled to discuss the book Oct. 10 at the Society for Social Studies of Science’s annual meeting in Toronto. Cornell’s announcement is the source for the three dates; readers seeking event times and attendance details should check with the organizers.
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