African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health: Diseases & Treatments in South Africa - Hardcover

Beinart, Professor William; Brown, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847010830 ISBN 13: 9781847010834

Publisher: James Currey, 2013

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review:

African Local Knowledge is an important book. Its wider arguments are engaging and should encourage a rethinking of older, binary oppositions between "science" and "tradition" in other regions of African pastoral production where patterns of grazing management have also changed and where these ideas now seem equally outdated. AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW 'a path-breaking view of South African animal disease and remedies where African owners are concerned. Focusing on local veterinary knowledge and therapeutics by African owners in such depth through 200 interviews in five areas is innovative and opens up an original field of knowledge and practice.' - Professor Anne Digby, Oxford Brookes University

About this edition

• Publisher: James Currey
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1847010830
• ISBN 13: 9781847010834
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320