“Raising the Dust” investigates the socioecological aspects of traditional medicine in the Mulanje Mountain Biosphere Reserve, in the south of Malawi. It seeks to understand how the practice of traditional medicine , particularly holistic and relational approaches, can contribute to enhanced health and wellbeing , thereby increasing our understanding of the relationship between humans and nature. In this sense the book aims to add to growing interests in cross-cultural health and wellbeing narratives, passed down through the generations, promoting ethnomedical¹ knowledge, practices and beliefs. In a unique manner, the book sifts through, reviews, re-examines and recycles a number of different, yet inevitably related theoretical ‘soap wrappers’ in the cross-cultural health debate. In so doing, it seeks to ‘re-plant’ a useful variety of ecological ideas into how we think about health and wellbeing , over the long term.

This journey began a long time ago, in South Africa, when I was around five years old and first started exploring the world through everyday things, like soap wrappers and colourful packets of seeds. I remember spending my time carefully sorting through soap wrappers so I could repurpose them as note pads and anxiously waiting for new packets of flower and vegetable seeds to plant in my very first patch of dirt. From an early age I felt a sense of not-quite-belonging and looked towards nature to help me find my place in the world. This enduring sense of placelessness made me conscious of the need for harmony and groundedness with the rest of life. There was something about the earth that made me feel alive, and as I watched the seeds I had planted grow roots and become embedded in the soil, I felt a connection with the rest of nature. By observing nature in this way, I learnt the importance of wholeness and this enduring need for harmony and balance has motivated my interest in health and healing ever since. My own understanding of the interconnectedness of everyday life, learnt through observing nature in this way, underpins this health narrative.

Chivaura (2006) explains that just as tortoises carry their homes around on their backs, we carry our worldviews with us wherever we go. In some ways this book is a reflection of my own tortoise-like experiences. On one level it draws on my early childhood curiosities about the world around me, a world that was an adventurous place, to be discovered and enjoyed. In my eagerness to get from place to place I walked too soon and often ended up at the bottom of the wooden stairs in the double story house where we lived. Francis, the maid who worked for our family at the time, would pick me up and make me a double-decker jam sandwich and a warm cup of tea and I would soon return to my explorations. I always seemed to want to know more about what lay beyond the things I could immediately see; up the tree, under the bush, deep in the soil, over there, and so on. I was always uncovering and discovering new things in my environment and at times found myself in recovery from my earthly adventures.

By the time I went to school I had bent knees and turned in toes and had knocked out my two new front teeth from wanting to take in all of life’s experiences. My mother worried about my adventurous spirit and she often had to use her nursing skills to patch up my misadventures. Despite these injuries and misfortunes, in my mind the world was still a safe and sacred place. I inevitably grew up and as I became more socially and politically aware, once more my views about the world around me changed and evolved. My childhood sense of the world as a harmonious, exciting and abundant place became constrained by apartheid, a system of politically enforced racial segregation. My birth certificate classified me as a ‘White’ South African, separate from my fellow ‘Black’, ‘Indian’ and ‘Coloured’ citizens. Apartheid separated not only people, but cultures and traditions and as I grew to adulthood, I began questioning these artificial divisions and became increasingly interested in learning about how so called ‘other’ communities lived. This curiosity led me to study anthropology as a way of trying to better understand the worldviews and experiences of my fellow citizens.

“Raising the Dust” capitalises on my own struggles to make sense of the ways in which seemingly disparate aspects of life can somehow “hang together” (Evanhoff 2005:71). I struggled to make sense of apartheid and rejected outright its notion of separateness, turning back to those interconnected, interrelated and holistic approaches to life that made more sense to me. I became interested in ecological approaches to health and healing and pursued these interests through studies of so-called “alternative” medicine. These studies also left gaps, and more often than not, raised important questions about peace, justice, equality and sustainability . I yearned for understanding, for that something more that was missing. As I thought about these things, I returned to my early childhood notions of the world as a safe, harmonious and peaceful place, where I had learned to belong. How had I come to feel grounded, and alive in such a segregated and fragmented world, I wondered?

After years of thinking about these questions, it seemed that one way to find the answers was to return to where it all began. Having lived in a wealthy, industrialised country like Australia for more than two decades, much of what I knew as a child had become overly sanitised and standardised. To recover the answers to my persistent concerns, I felt a growing need to talk directly with people who still hold knowledge about these things. Since I had learned so much about life from traditional healers and conservationists from an early age, I turned to them once more to be reminded of the things I had lost touch with. This inquiry draws on my experiences of that assumed knowledge, seeking to understand it critically and analytically.

My interest in traditional medicine is partly prompted by my close friendship with Togo, a traditional healer from South Africa. I had not had any contact with my friend since immigrating to Australia in the early 1990s but one day she unexpectedly contacted me through a dream. Not my own dream, but through the dream of a trusted colleague. While at work one morning at a local community health service, my colleague, a clinically trained nurse, came to me and told me that she had dreamt about me the previous night and that:

in that dream I saw this woman, she was standing before me with her hands placed on her hips, swaying from side to side and shaking her head. This joyful woman has instructed me to ask you why you have not yet started your research?

Dreams are an important way of passing indigenous knowledge on to others and using an old photo, the bio-medically trained nurse helped me to identify the woman she saw in her dream as my friend Togo, who I knew as Sarah. My colleague had no way of knowing who Sarah was and her insightful dream surprised me sufficiently to begin this research inquiry.

This book comprises ten chapters. Chapter 1 presents the main aims and ideas of the book and broadly defines the ecological thinking that informs the topic. In so doing, it begins to outline the conceptual framework of the inquiry. Chapter 2 gives an explanation of the ethnographic methodology applied to the research and sets out the qualitative methods used. It also provides a description of the research process, highlighting the ways in which the interviews were set up and details the fieldwork context of the inquiry. Chapter 2 begins to challenge some of the initial research assumptions, in light of these everyday realities. These first two chapters outline the framework of the inquiry and set up the parameters for data collection and interpretation. The fieldwork is reported in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, providing an analysis of the main findings in the context of the participants’ everyday lived experiences. Consistent with the ethnographic methodology informing this narrative inquiry, the findings are woven into the analysis so as to allow the main themes to emerge in a grounded way. Additionally, Chap. 8 moves the analysis towards a deeper discussion of these findings, highlighting the state of the Mulanje Mountain Biosphere Reserve, in light of these realities. Chapter 9 reflects back on the ecological theory framing the topic, reviewing it as necessary. The concluding chapter provides a summary, draws attention to some of the strengths and limitations of the book and suggests a direction for further research.

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