Conjuring the modern in Africa: durability and rupture in histories of public healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa.

THE VALUABLE EMPHASIS ON MODERNITY in colonial and postcolonial African studies has profoundly divided precolonial African history from what comes after. But the depth and complexity of African aspirations for moral community and the forms of collective action they inspire, often in the face of severe material constraints, exceed the explanatory power of narratives of modernity oriented toward the history of capital, colony, and commerce. Long-term regional histories of durable bundles of meaning and practice grounded in Africa address these matters in part by working across tight spaces of ethnicity and beyond shallow chronologies. In particular, a history of public healing reveals compelling notions of public health and forms of power that cut across the colonial period but were transformed by colonialism. Public healing has wrestled with shifting boundaries between a porous social body’s moral communities and the starker outline of an embodied, autonomous individual. Modes of power and authority central to politics and to healing practices, public or private, have moved uneasily but productively against each other over the last millennium, as agricultural systems changed, as centralized states formed, and as commodified economies grew. Over the last century, they have moved against the forms of power and authority embodied in a colonial state or in biomedicine. In the context of public healing between the African Great Lakes, the historical complexity of relations between these entangled aspects of life reveals a heterotemporal modern Africa beyond the hybrid or the alternative forms of modernity so prevalent in the literature. Since the 1990s, work in African colonial history has emphasized African appropriations of European forms of knowledge and practice in a single field of culture inflected by political economy. These ethnographically dense explorations of what has been called “the colonial situation” push beyond a paradigm of “encounter” into a contingent history of colonial and postcolonial modernity. One scholar, Nancy Rose Hunt, finds valuable sources for her analytical categories in a precolonial Cen-