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- Convenors:
-
Katrien Pype
(KU Leuven University)
Julie Archambault (Concordia University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Nancy Rose Hunt
(University of Florida)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH120
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel explores wellness in Africa as practice, mindset, enterprise and/or material culture, with a focus on how the recent "wellness craze", which speaks of shared anxieties and aspirations, intersects with religious and therapeutic practices.
Long Abstract:
Wellness", the marker of good physical and mental health—is, no doubt, an age-old preoccupation. Closely connected to the notion of "well-being" - which in certain respects has a more relational connotation, a "wellness craze" has emerged in recent years, inspiring entrepreneurs and health practitioners all over the world. Indeed, the global health and wellness industry is now worth a trillion dollars and is making important headways across the African continent. Wellness is also transforming the urban landscape. Alongside the scores of joggers that take to the streets before the crack of dawn, public outdoor gyms have cropped up in parks across the continent while old colonial cinema halls that served as Pentecostal churches have now been converted into fitness centres. From the yoga retreats on Lake Malawi that mainly cater to a European market and the Chinese supermarkets that sell slimming teas to local consumers, the global wellness craze speaks of shared anxieties and aspirations.
We invite ethnographically informed papers across the social sciences that explore "wellness" in Africa as practice, mindset, enterprise and/or material culture, and that engage with some of the following questions:
How is wellness, as an individual pursuit requiring discipline and determination, building on and/or clashing with local notions of wellbeing and body aesthetics?
How does the recent wellness craze intersect with more entrenched religious and therapeutic practices?
How is wellness transforming the urban landscape and the usage of space?
How does wellness participate in class formation? Should the pursuit of wellness be understood as an essentially middle class concern?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Because formal systems of public health and welfare are scarce, religion is likely to have important implications for health in the rural African context. Yet research on this topic is negligible. The purpose of this paper is to examine religion and health in rural Malawi.
Paper long abstract:
While research elsewhere has found important links between religion and health, especially in industrialized settings, greater understanding of this issue in sub-Saharan Africa is needed. In a setting largely lacking formal systems of social support, religion is likely to be an important source of support in the rural African context. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between religion and health for women and men in rural Malawi, using data from the 2008 and 2010 waves of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health. The measures of health two years after baseline are the mental and physical health scores from the Short Form-12. The measures of religion are affiliation, attendance to church or mosque, participation in religious activities, and congregational support. After controlling for baseline health, results show that: (1) the relationship between religion and health differs between younger (15-44 years) and older (45+ years) adults (for both women and men); (2) among younger adults, Muslims are relatively less healthy, whereas Muslims are healthier in older age; (3) religious activities have a stronger relationship with health than do attendance or congregational support, especially for women; and (4) the measure for religious activities has a relationship with health only for two or more activities. These findings suggest that religion outside of weekly attendance to religious services is tied to future health in rural Malawi, especially for older women.
Paper short abstract:
The paper interrogates the phenomenon of wellness among the Nigerian urban middle class. It compares how the two genders interrogate wellness in Ibadan which has served historically as a capital city for over five decade.
Paper long abstract:
Wellness is a nineteenth century phenomenon which redefined the meaning of good health from the absence of illness to an ongoing pursuit of functionality. It changed the objective meaning of health to a subjective one in which self-management, self-empowerment strategies are prescribed. These new developments were, of course, a characteristic of the European industrial revolution and urbanization which threw up the new middle class that questioned the existing societal interpretation of meanings. Of significance, however, is the continuity in this questioning in the twentieth century with regards to wellness with the global wellness industry valued at $3.7 trillion in 2015.
Though with a different historico-sociological experience, Nigeria was incorporated into the industrial world capitalist system in the nineteenth century. About more than two centuries later, the question is whether the new middle class in Nigeria has imbibed that questioning of the status quo mentality typical of the European experience. This paper interrogates the phenomenon in the definition of wellness among the Nigerian urban middle class. Of central interest would be a comparison of how the two genders interrogate wellness. Methodologically, we focus on Ibadan which was the capital of the Western region during the First Republic, the capital of Western state during the Second Republic, the capital of the 'big' Oyo state, comprising of Osun and Oyo states, and, later, the smaller Oyo state.
Word count: 224
Key words: Gender, Wellness, urban Ibadan, Oyo state Nigeria
Paper short abstract:
How did sugar produce specific meanings and practices in Lusophone colonial Africa? I explore its historical significance for Portuguese Mozambique in European imperial context, and consider a plantation club’s role in delineating spaces of leisure, racial exclusion, and elite cosmopolitanism.
Paper long abstract:
Sugar has long been associated with imperial rule, to which Sydney Mintz's (1985) foundational text on the commodity and its histories, violent productions, and cultural associations attests. In this paper I ask: In what ways did sugar produce specific cultural meanings and practices, particularly in Lusophone colonial Africa? Considering two interrelated subjects, I explore connections between sugar and imaginations of social and racial refinement, leisure and luxury, and Lusophone cosmopolitanism in Mozambique. First, I address sugar's important symbolic role in Portugal's assertion of imperial rule, vis-à-vis anxieties over more formidable British economic and regional power. I then examine the sugar-producing town of Xinavane, Mozambique, and its delineations of rurality and urbanity along racial and spatial lines. Focusing on the plantation club, I argue that particular spaces and practices of leisure and pleasure were created through European-African circuits, imaginations, and racialized sensibilities around urban and elite sociality. These senses and practices depended in turn on the measurement of 'refined' work and leisure against the coerced African agrarian labors needed for sugar cultivation. Ultimately, these imaginaries - and their material articulations - worked to prove Portuguese racial superiority over Africans, and solidify Portugal's status as a 'true' European power. I engage sugar's cultural and material resonances to consider its relevance to Mozambican sugar and its production today.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss the preliminary findings of research I’m carrying out on the pursuit of fitness in Mozambique and on the spread of the global wellness industry across sub-Saharan Africa.
Paper long abstract:
When the municipal park in the Mozambican city of Inhambane was rehabilitated a couple of years ago, the developers also included public exercise machines likes the ones found along the coast in places like Lisbon or Santa Monica. Unlike the private indoor gym which caters for expatriates and the local middle class, the park tends to attract mainly children. In some back yards, you'll even find makeshift home gyms with weights made of concrete and large canvas bags filled with sand. And every day before sunrise, there are scores of joggers who run around this sleepy town. All these scenes speak of a relatively new activity in this part of the world: working out. Although agriculture and arduous household chores have historically kept women fit, and although playing football has long been a popular pastime among young men, the growing interest in fitness is driven by desires and pressures that are significantly different. The very understanding of what constitutes fitness, along with ideas about body aesthetics, are also changing. In this paper I discuss the preliminary findings of research I'm carrying out on the pursuit of fitness in Mozambique and on the spread of the global wellness industry across sub-Saharan Africa.