A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World

Abstract

For Tanzanians, modern bodies bear complicated toxic loads not only because of the dumping of capitalism’s harmful by-products but also because of the social-material effects of efforts designed to address insecurity, poverty, and disease. Dawa lishe(nutritious medicine) is forged in this double bind. Producers of dawa lisheproblematize toxicity as the condition under which life is attenuated, diminished, depleted, exhausted, or drained away. Therapies attend not only to individual bodies but also to relations among people, plants, and the soil. The efficacy of herbal remedies and of gardens full of therapeutic foods and nutritious herbs rests in the cultivation of the forms of strength that make places, times, and bodies livable again (and again). This essay examines how Tanzanians are laboring over, and reflecting on, the toxic and its relationship to remedy and memory through dawa lishe. In the process, it argues, they are redefining healing through a politics of habitability.

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…A final set of articles across the main anthropology journals took failures to contain toxicity, waste, and contamination as points of departure. These calls invite us to stage inquiries from the embodied materiality of runaway change in forms of toxicity produced by capitalism, colonization, nationalism, and racialized inequality and exclusions (Stoetzer , 299; Willis , 326) and the ways that these linger in bodies (Langwick ), infrastructures, landscapes, and at multiple scales (Hecht ). If the work I have examined thus far focuses on disposable people, animals, plants, and bodies, the work I discuss in this section considers a related set of questions about toxic waste, the landscapes it inhabits, and how these landscapes can be salvaged.…”

“…In contrast to the toxic oil palms Chao () described in West Papua, Langwick's () focus was on dawa lishe , “nutritious medicine” cultivated in local gardens in Tanzania as an antidote to the toxic loads Tanzanians’ bodies carry. Toxicity here is a result of the spilling over, or lack of containment, of “capitalism's harmful by‐products” as well as “the very products that facilitate domestic life (plastics, kerosene), agriculture (pesticides, chemical fertilizers) and health (antiretrovirals, contraceptives)” (434).…”

“…We can perhaps shift deliberately to seeing ourselves as “complicit anthropologists” rather than merely allies (Gomberg‐Munoz ; see also Hughes ), rendering ever more visible how we are captive, and contributing, to these global troubles even as we attempt to stay with them. If the events of 2018 are any indication, anthropological engagement that considers “what ongoingness and what forms of continuance” (Langwick , 36) our research partnerships support remains deeply pressing.…”

“…), or plants (Chao ; Chapman ). Some renarrated the history of anthropological theory in an effort to “ integrat [ e ] dark and light anthropologies” (Rodseth , 398; emphasis in original), while others identified specific sites that illuminate unlikely transformative growth or world‐making, such as compost in Tanzania (Langwick ), toxic waste in Brazil (Willis ), urban rubble in Germany (Stoetzer ), “experiments in the ecology of everyday life” in the deserts of Southern California (Vine , 405), or Indigenous media futures (Dowell ; D. Fisher ; Ginsburg ; Hennessy, Smith, and Hogue ; Lempert ). Ethnographers took seriously the variety of ways people (and their oddkin) aimed to hold creativity and devastation together in their own lives as well as imagined transformation, reminding us to “pay thoughtful attention to those who have already lived through an apocalypse and are articulating generative hope in its aftermath” (Lempert , 203).…”

Air in Unexpected Places

“…In recent ethnography, notable hyposubjects might include matsutake mushroom pickers in the American northwest sensitively chronicled by Anna Tsing (2015), learning to live in the aftermath of American war in Southeast Asia, economic fallout and ecological ruin. Likewise the women in Stacey Langwick's (2018) wonderful portrait of an NGO based in Northern Tanzania that promotes and distributes dawa lishe, fortifying medicinal herbs that remediate the generalized toxicity of African life. While not directly a politics of decarbonization per se, foraging and community gardens cut transversally across capitalist energetics.…”