Medicines That Feed Us

“With this beautiful, nuanced ethnography, Stacey Langwick has produced a landmark study of African healing. Medicines that Feed Us takes readers through a set of experiments with plants by which Tanzanians theorize healing through practice in a toxic world. In refusing the false divides between body and environment or medicine and food, this brilliant new book places the deep insights of African theory at the center of how to reckon with toxicity.” - Julie Livingston, author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa

“Grounded in decades of scholarly and personal engagement, Langwick’s ethnography explores the entanglements between human and nonhuman, living and non-living, and body and ecology. It merges medical and environmental concerns, intertwining health and agricultural questions in a thoroughly innovative and literal way. Medicines That Feed Us is an outstanding work that has the potential to considerably advance discussions within cultural and social anthropology, and collaborations with other disciplines and activism.” - Paul Wenzel Geissler, coauthor of Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa

"A timely intervention. . . . The book will be valuable to scholars of medical anthropology, the history of medicine, environmental history, and African history." - Jonathan Okoe, African Studies Quarterly