Those Who Touch Tuareg Medicine Women in Anthropological Perspective by Susan Rasmussen

Abstract

In an engaging and richly documented book, Susan Rasmussen addresses one of the healing traditions of the Tuareg (of Niger and Mali, West Africa), illustrating the mediating roles of the tinesmegelen (women healers). She provides a rich description of metaphors of illness and health through case studies that convey emic concepts of maladies, which Rasmussen generally refused to translate into Western categories because of what she considers the lack of true translatability. While recognizing the difficulty in generalizing about these practices in terms of the classic categories of anthropology and Western thought, she nonetheless engages in comparisons of these practices to European and cross-cultural categories and practices. These healing practices cross-cut the distinctions of physical and spiritual medicine and integrate these different aspects of healing. Rasmussen explains how the practices of the tinesmegelen challenge the legitimacy of these dichotomies, engaging conditions that cannot be reduced to naturalistic conditions nor seen as strictly spiritual or cultural. By refusing to categorize the tinesmegelen as just natural or spiritual healers, Rasmussen shows how their practices and ideology overcome the binary contradictions of culture and nature. These views are illustrated in examination of the roles of touch in diagnosis and healing and in showing how botanical knowledge and applications involve more than just physical medicine.