‘Medicines that feed us’ promote healing in a toxic world

On the shelves of a small shop in Moshi, Tanzania, the colorful label on a packet of Dorkia Enterprises' lemongrass tea makes a sweeping promise: to cleanse the body of toxins - from industrial agricultural practices, modern medicine, common cookware, everyday chemicals and mental stress.

The two women who started this small business in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro do not offer their "mchaichai" as a miracle cure, Stacey Langwick, professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, writes in her new book, "Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World." Rather, Langwick says, it is an invitation to navigate the toxins pulled into homes and bodies through everyday acts of breathing, cooking and eating, by shifting relations with plants. Langwick describes the tea as part of a broader effort her Tanzanian friends refer to as "dawa lishe," a Kiswahili phrase meaning medicines that feed us, to find ways of speaking of human health, and of intervening in bodies that are inseparable from land.

Langwick will discuss "Medicines that Feed Us" on Oct. 10 at the Society for Social Studies of Science's annual meeting in Toronto; at The Soil Factory in Ithaca on Oct. 18, an event co-sponsored by Buffalo Street Books; and in a Nov. 4 talk on campus sponsored by the Einaudi Center for International Studies and Institute for African Development. She discussed her research with the Chronicle.

Q. How did you arrive at the book's fundamental question: What does it mean to heal in a toxic world?

Answer: I argue that the defining double-bind of our time is the pervasive sense that toxicity is a necessary condition of modern life. Toxicity is inherent in the ways we have organized collective life and institutionalized care: in practices that support health, in farming and building, and in strategies for accumulating wealth. The paradox is that the very practices through which we pursue the health and well-being of people and land simultaneously threaten the possibility of their continued existence. Reflecting on and laboring over this fact is the ground for contemporary ethics.

"Medicines That Feed Us" is about the ongoing composition of bodies, lands, plants and social worlds together, not simply a story about harmful substances entering individual bodies. Innovative Tanzanian NGO leaders, community organizers, entrepreneurs and farmers are thinking about healing through cultivation, feeding, gardening, composting and plant medicines. Their projects ask what flourishing might look like when we recognize that bodies and lands are inseparable.

Q: Where does the phrase "dawa lishe" come from?

A: The phrase was proposed by one of my friends and mentors, Helen Tibandebage Nguya. She is the founder and current executive director of Training, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation for Gender and AIDS (TRMEGA), an innovative nongovernmental organization that addresses health issues through land relations.

We had driven west of Arusha to visit a garden that TRMEGA had helped seed at an orphanage. The landscape was dry. We had to avoid deep erosion gullies as we drove. When we arrived at the orphanage, however, the garden was flourishing. Children moved between the rows, picking greens for the kitchen, while Nguya and her colleague Jane Mwalyego talked with the gardener about the soils as well as about transplanting the seedlings and cultivating cuttings we had brought.

On the drive back, our conversation turned to the conceptual questions that regularly shaped our work together. That was when Nguya proposed the phrase "dawa lishe" - medicines that feed us - in an effort to name projects that offered renewed relations between people and plants as an intervention into the prolonged depletion and ongoing injury of bodies and soils.

The phrase does more than combine medicine (dawa) and nutrient-dense food (chakula lishe). It names an effort to challenge the divisions between medicine, agriculture, nourishment and healing, and to imagine healing as a practice of dwelling: attending to the ways bodies and land move through each other.

Q: How does "dawa lishe" challenge conventional ideas about healing?

A: Conventionally, biomedicine treats bodies as distinct from - even if impacted by - their environments. As a result, social and ecological relations become factors external to bodies. "Dawa lishe" names local efforts that challenge the idea that health is primarily an individual biological state. Remedies include cultivating gardens, sharing seeds and seedlings, developing plant-based remedies, promoting diverse and indigenous crops, and building communities around agro-ecological practices.

The point is not that all plant-based remedies are inherently good or safe. Rather, demanding that remedies be nourishing changes how we evaluate benefits and risks. Taking bodies and lands as internal to one another opens up ways to address rising rates of chronic disease as a manifestation of the chronic depletions of extractive ecological and economic relations organizing modern life.

Q: Do advocates of "dawa lishe" reject modern medicine?

A: No. TRMEGA, for instance, works specifically to support people in continuing their anti-retroviral drugs. The projects in "Medicines That Feed Us" do not suggest that people simply abandon pharmaceuticals, nor do they imagine it is feasible to abandon all commercially produced foods. Rather, they described how bodies forged through modern medicine and industrial agriculture are sites of chemical accumulation.

The challenge is to interrupt, rework, reorganize and/or metabolize the toxicities that inhere in healing and eating in Tanzania today, including fertilizers, hormones, pesticides and the side effects of "hospital medicine." Valuing plants as therapeutic is therefore a way to hold both medicine and agriculture to account. Drugs, the concept of "dawa lishe" asserts, should be nourishing, and food should be healing.

Q: How do these efforts envision a healthier future?

A: Toxicity is already woven into contemporary life. The question becomes not how to achieve impossible purity, but how to live, heal and sustain relations that work toward more livable worlds.

The futures imagined through these practices are not utopian futures free from harm or vulnerability. They are grounded in responsiveness, repair, interdependence and ecological coexistence. My Tanzanian colleagues are theorizing these futures through gardens, herbal medicine, cultivation, feeding and land relations.

What they make imaginable is a different organization of life itself: health grounded in relational flourishing rather than individual optimization; sovereignty rooted in interdependence rather than bodily and territorial control; and multispecies forms of collective survival.