Those Who Touch: Tuareg Women in Anthropological Perspective. Susan J. Rasmussen. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2006. xii + 234 pp.

Reviewed by: Patric V. Giesler, Gustavus Adolphus College

Susan Rasmussen’s aim and efforts, here, to translate the concepts and experiences of illness and healing among the Tuareg of Niger and Mali remind me of Catherine Lutz’s (1988) goal and struggles to translate Ifaluk concepts and experiences of emotion. Lutz argued that we impose Western mind/body dualism onto how we portray and understand others’ concepts and experiences of emotion, and Rasmussen similarly argues that we impose Western modes of thought, and in particular biomedical categories, onto how we portray, understand, and classify folk healers and their healing. Tuareg medicine women healers (i.e., “those who touch”) and their healing practices, she argues, belie such classifications as well as those of medical anthropology, anthropology of religion, and feminist anthropology where healing is often typed as either of the body or of the mind, and folk healers distinguished as either male and socially and religiously dominant or female and socially downtrodden and religiously peripheral (p. 22). She argues that Tuareg medicine women’s concepts of illness, which illnesses they treat, and how don’t fit the mind/body typing or models derived from that opposition. Moreover, these female healers are hardly marginal; they are nobles and privileged!

This is the fourth of Rasmussen’s works on the Tuareg and is a welcome contribution to debates on these and other contested issues of translation; our and their categories; gender, power, and healing, including ethnopsychiatry; and the discursive dynamics of medical pluralism. Also, her in-depth ethnographic focus on one kind of Tuareg healer, the medicine woman, offers what is missing in her previous book on Tuareg healing (2001). There she analyzes the wider field of Tuareg medical pluralism, but does not describe any of its constituent approaches in detail. In Those Who Touch Rasmussen draws on this previous analysis to examine how medicine women healers, known for their unique diagnosis/divination by touch and herbal/massage treatments of physical ailments, are situated in the wider field of healing systems and power. This wider field includes the male Islamic scholars or marabouts, who are healers of mental disturbances attributed to spirits and who use Koranic verses, amulets, and divination in their treatments, as well as the practitioners of Western-modeled biomedicine. Although medicine women are routinely categorized by the Tuareg and Westerners as female herbalists who diagnose and treat physical ailments, Rasmussen argues throughout that, in practice, they also contribute to what is, prototypically, the domain of the male marabouts-- the diagnosing and healing of psychological and psychosocial conflicts and disturbances.

The book is organized around three main parts with several chapters each. In Part One, “Departures,” she fleshes out her main arguments (Chapter 1) and introduces Tuareg medicine women, their beliefs and practices, providing initial support for her central arguments (Chapter 2). Rasmussen shows that while medicine women’s fundamental concepts of  taksi and tesmet, “hot” and “cold,” designate types of illnesses and physical symptoms, they also refer to distinctive  psychodynamics, personality types, gender qualities, and personal psychopathologies (by an excess of one or the other) (p. 47).  Similarly, another concept, karambaza, refers to a specific type of stomach ailment caused by one’s stressed relationship with smiths/artisans. If a smith/artisan is angered, “the anger is said to fly from his heart to the victim” (p. 49) as a malevolent force called tezma, reminiscent of mangu among the Azande, also associated with psychosocial stresses (Evans-Pritchard 1987).

In Part Two: “Touch and Word,” Rasmussen details the central significance of “touch” in medicine women’s practice, which is striking in the context of Tuareg society where bodily contact is shamed and kinesthetics (as in the sharp physical movements of their massage treatments) are ordinarily highly restrained (Chapter 3). Consistent with her central argument, touch not only reveals physical illness, but also psychosocial stresses (p. 61), and physical problems identified by touch are often tied to ethnopsychological concepts. For example, a problem with the liver, viewed as the “seat of sentiments such as anger and love” (p. 73), could be due to “evil mouth” (negative gossip), which in attacking a person thus injures the liver (p. 59). In Chapter 4 we learn that verbal expression is fundamental to medicine women’s practice for pronouncing powerful blessings, transmitting their healing tradition, and relating accounts of its matrilineal origins and relationship to a mythical matriarchy before Islam.

In the remaining chapters of Part Two, Rasmussen reviews several exemplary cases of treatments by medicine women where physical problems are tied to psychosocial dynamics (Chapter 5) and then discusses the mythology surrounding medicinal trees and the significance of arboreal tropes for medicine women and their treatments, as for gender, descent, spirits, and madness (Chapter 6).

In Part Three: “Women and Wider Systems of Power,” Rasmussen unravels the relationship between medicine women and male Islamic marabouts (Chapters 7, 8, 9) and between medicine women and biomedical practitioners (Chapter 10). She argues that although the Tuareg portray the ideal of a sharp division between medicine women’s and marabouts’ magico-religious power (Chapter 7), areas of specialization and treatment (Chapter 8), and diagnostic techniques and relationship to spirits (Chapter 9), in reality, the division is not sharp but fuzzy, with much overlap and interpenetration. Further, although outside analysts portray a rosy collaboration between the Tuareg folk healers and biomedical practitioners, the relationship between them is complex, tenuous, and stressed (Chapter 10).

Of particular interest to Ethos readers is Rasmussen’s fascinating description of a special kind of medicine woman, a “dream diviner,” and the Tuareg ethnopsychiatry of depressive states (Chapter 9). These medicine women master the Kel Essuf spirits, which they believe cause depression, during their own shaman-like “initiatory” experience of essuf illness, and then heal others (pp. 171-175).

This is a book packed with rich and valuable ethnographic material. Rasmussen’s sophisticated and nuanced knowledge of Tuareg medicine women reflects her extended periods of fieldwork over several decades, enabling her to discern the much greater complexity of medicine women’s theories and practice than previously understood. However, her analysis would have benefited from an empirically informed prototype-based modeling of that complexity, or that is, of what all medicine women really believe and do, the variations, and how they overlap and compare with the other healing systems. Further, although Rasmussen’s descriptions of medicine women’s concepts of illness and the holistic nature of their healing are important, we don’t really learn in any detail about the mechanisms or efficacy of the treatment strategies, or even how the treatments are actually carried out, except in broad strokes.  

Despite these issues, this is a valuable and provocative ethnography that merits the attention of medical and psychological anthropologists, as well as anthropologists of religion and gender.

REFERENCES CITED

Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan

1987 [1937] Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande.  Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Lutz, Catherine A.

1988  Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll & Their Challenge to Western Theory.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Rasmussen, Susan

2001  Healing in Community: Medicine, Contested Terrains, and Cultural Encounters among the Tuareg.  Westport, CN: Bergin & Garvey.