Re-Thinking a Matrilineal Myth of Healing: Tuareg Medicine Women, Islam, and the Market in Niger
This article explores the changing metaphoric logic and contextual uses of a mythical-historical popular religious account of matrilineal origins of herbal medicine women among Tuareg in northern Niger. Medicine women both reproduce and modify this origin myth’s motif in their Tamajaq-speaking, Musl...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2021
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2021, Volume: 89, Issue: 3, Pages: 909-930 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article explores the changing metaphoric logic and contextual uses of a mythical-historical popular religious account of matrilineal origins of herbal medicine women among Tuareg in northern Niger. Medicine women both reproduce and modify this origin myth’s motif in their Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, traditionally ranked, and semi-nomadic communities, where many have faced religious, socioeconomic, and political upheavals challenging local women’s material wealth and symbolic/cultural capital of authoritative medico-ritual healing. How is medicine women’s healing legacy evoked and re-interpreted in encounters with Qur’anic healing and western biomedicine, as impacted by recent religious debates, neoliberal structural adjustments, droughts, sedentarization, and political violence? The Tuareg data offer fresh perspectives on how religion and economy co-produce each other in some contexts, but contradict each other in others. More broadly, this article critically disrupts categories of sacred and secular, tradition and modernity, and brings mythico-histories into discussions of intertwining religious and economic idioms, practices, and infrastructures. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfab076 |