The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange (review)

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY David Baronov. The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. ix + 248 pp. References. Index. $54.50. Cloth. David Baronov has published a book whose subject matter should appeal to Africanists in a number of different ways. He examines Western medicine in Africa - and also, purportedly, the African transformation thereof - and he does so through the lens of world-systems theory, a perspective with many adherents, including this reviewer. Unfortunately, the promising subject matter is lost in the implementation, and the result is a work likely to be of litde use to Africanists. The book begins with an assertion that signals the problems. Baronov writes that his analysis will rely on many disparate and overlapping professional including anthropology, medical sociology, medical history, African political economy, and colonial/postcolonial studies, melding them through a unidisciplinary approach. He contrasts this approach with research, which he defines as taking place among individuals from different fields working together, but not overcoming the traditional apartheid structure of academia (10). This notion of interdisciplinary work is at best a straw man. Baronov seems unaware of the decades of scholarly work in African most often termed interdisciplinary, in which scholars have drawn productively from a number of different fields. Instead of convincing the reader that he is offering a new analytical approach, he leaves the impression that he is unfamiliar with the fields in which he intends to work. That impression is confirmed as the book progresses. Rather than demonstrating any sort of mastery of these various fields, he picks and chooses among a number of works without showing any grounding in their theoretical or methodological contexts. Another problem is that he provides essentially no data; no primary sources are indicated and there is no evidence of research in Africa, with the sections on African medical practices based on a small number of dated secondary sources. These accounts (154-78) consist of a section on the Azande based on Evans-Pritchard's 1937 book, Janzen's work on Lower Zaire from the 1960s, information about the Zaramo in Dar es Salaam by Swantz published in 1990, and Good's work from the late 1970s and published in 1987 focusing on the Kamba. …