The Problem of Money: African Agency & Western Medicine in Northern Ghana

Bierlich, Bernhard

ISBN 10: 1845453514 ISBN 13: 9781845453510

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2007

Synopsis

Based on long-term medical anthropological research in northern Ghana, the author analyses issues of health and healing, of gender, and of the control and use of money in a changing rural African setting. He describes the culture of medical pluralism, so typical for neo-colonial states, and people’s choices of “traditional” (local) medicine (plants and sacrifices), Islamic medicine (charms and various written solutions) and ”modern” therapy (biomedicine, in particular western pharmaceuticals). He concludes that the rural-urban divide is a fiction, that demarcations between these areas are frequently blurred, linked by a postcolonial, capitalist discourse of local markets, regional economies and national structures, which frequently emerge in local African settings but often originate in global and multinational markets.

About this title

About the Author

Bernhard Bierlich is a social and medical anthropologist. He is a member of the Danish Galathea 3 research expedition to inter alia West Africa and the West Indies. He is also affiliated with the Department of History at the University of Copenhagen and a Research Associate of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull.

Edition details

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1845453514
• ISBN 13: 9781845453510
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 248