Bibi’s Uchungu: Eating, Bitterness, and Relationality across Indian Ocean Worlds

Abstract

Recent Indian Ocean World scholarship shows how biomedicine and ‘traditional’ medicine have been coproduced through their encounters, such that even the notions of “medical pluralism” and “hybridity” are insufficient to capture the ways in which such healing regimes comingle. This chapter contributes to such work by exploring the role of bodily sensoriums and the practice of ‘eating’ medicines as pharmaceuticals move across—and co-construct—healing regimes in Tanzania. Anchored in a fieldwork case about grief, this chapter specifically demonstrates the centrality of bitterness—manifested in substances like nyongo (bile), antibiotics, and traditional medicinal plants—arguing that bitterness itself is crucial in forming both the ties that bind family members and the similitudes that forge IOWs. Finally, through this scholarly attunement to sensoriums and embodiment, a new methodological approach for studying IOWs is also proposed: while much IOW scholarship to date has focused on the ways in which geographically distant locals are connected physically across space, this approach reveals how the qualia that comprise a world may also inhere in a single place, home, family, and even, body.