Weathering the Hegemons

The threat of a dwindling clientele in a translocal context compelled indigenous healers in southeastern Nigeria to reconstitute their public imagery in ways that mobilize the allures of biomedicine and Christianity (their hegemonic rivals) toward advancing their own practice. They appropriate biomedicine’s technologies and scientific authority to validate indigenous healing yet frame biomedicine’s pharmaceutical treatment as not only shallow but also dangerous in its side effects. They project herbal therapy as pharmacologically founded as well as supernaturally grounded, carefully framing the narrative to reinforce the lingering public conviction that herbal medicine has potency against some ailments that biomedicine is unable to handle. The healers’ discursive tradition constructs herbal medicine as healthier and more rooted than biomedicine, which they cast as artificial and dangerously chemicalized. The perspective this ethnographic account raises is not only how healers resist the hierarchies of external domination, or even how indigenous healing is being transformed in this context of contact, but also how healers’ performative efforts expose the limits of biomedicine in order to undermine it and decenter it from the public’s health-seeking consciousness.