| Description |
1 online resource |
| Contents |
Machine generated contents note: Key contributions -- Context: livestock diseases in South African history -- Our research -- Historiography: towards medical and environmental pluralism -- Local knowledge and its limits -- Understanding the causes and symptoms of livestock diseases -- Livestock in African hands -- Conclusion -- Introduction -- Scientific understandings of ticks and efforts at control -- From state compulsion to individual responsibility -- the changing role of the state in relation to dipping -- Local knowledge about ticks and tick control -- Conclusion -- Introduction -- Old and new diseases -- Identifying infection: (a) the problem of naming -- Identifying infection: (b) contested clinical symptoms and post mortem findings -- Ideas about contagion, isolation and immunity -- Environment and the seasonality of diseases -- Conclusion -- context of transhumance -- Transhumance and disease -- demise of transhumance: processes and arguments -- Transhumance and grazing in Mbotyi -- Trekking between mountains and plains in QwaQwa -- Cattle posts in North West Province -- Conclusion -- Introduction: plants and biomedicines -- transfer of local knowledge: specialists, generations and gender -- Transmission of biomedical knowledge and medicine -- Choices of medicine: local medicines, biomedicines and other forms of treatment -- Conclusion -- Choice of plants -- Plant medicines in the North West Province -- Plant medicines in QwaQwa -- Plant medicines in the Eastern Cape -- Conclusion -- Witchcraft and the ambient supernatural -- Animal deaths and diseases associated with witchcraft -- ambient supernatural -- Umkhondo in Mpondoland -- Milking and the supernatural in Mbotyi -- Conclusion -- Introduction -- Mohato in contemporary cattle-owning communities -- Ideas about pollution and cattle disease in QwaQwa -- Practices and challenges -- Muthi to protect the kraal and the cattle -- Conclusion -- dynamics of local knowledge -- limits of local knowledge -- Recommendations for policy and practice -- Appendix 1 Recommendations -- Appendix 2 African Ideas about Diseases and Conditions Associated with the Environment -- Appendix 3 African Ideas about Supernatural Causation -- Appendix 4 Plants and Diseases -- Appendix 5 Non-Plant Remedies |
| Summary |
Understanding local knowledge has become a central academic project among those interested in Africa and developing countries. In South Africa, land reform is gathering pace and African people hold an increasing proportion of the livestock in the country. Animal health has become a central issue for rural development. Yet African veterinary medical knowledge remains largely unrecorded. This book seeks to fill that gap. It captures for the first time the diversity, as well as the limits, of a major sphere of local knowledge. Beinart and Brown argue that African approaches to animal health rest largely in environmental and nutritional explanations. They explore the widespread use of plants as well as biomedicines for healing. While rural populations remain concerned about supernatural threats, and many men think that women can harm their cattle, the authors challenge current ideas on the modernisation of witchcraft. They examine more ambient forms of supernatural danger expressed in little-known concepts such as mohato and umkhondo. They take the reader into the homesteads and kraals of rural black South Africans and engage with a key rural concern - vividly reporting the ideas of livestock owners. This is groundbreaking research which will have important implications for analyses of local knowledge more generally as well as effective state interventions and animal treatments in South Africa. William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; Karen Brown is an ESRC Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Traditional veterinary medicine -- Africa, Sub-Saharan
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Animal health -- Africa, Sub-Saharan
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TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING -- Agriculture -- Animal Husbandry.
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SCIENCE -- Environmental Science.
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Animal health
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Traditional veterinary medicine
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Sub-Saharan Africa
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781782041948 |
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178204194X |
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1306152216 |
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9781306152211 |
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