On Friday January 27th, Nancy Rose Hunt gave a Baraza presentation titled, “Harm: A Useful Concept for African Historical Studies?”. Dr. Hunt is Professor of History and African Studies at UF, coming here after many years at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke University Press), was the winner of the 2016 Martin A. Klein Prize by the American Historical Association (AHA).
Dr. Hunt introduced her use of ‘Harm’ as a running motif throughout her past and present research. Harm is a complicated concept. It is useful for building an unusual medical history where harm is a core component or container as well as a place for collecting stories about the bodily and adverse effects of disease, abandonment, political events, and so on. Dual conceptions of healing and harming are common language tropes within African historical studies, as these concepts have long been used as a part of political discourse in different African contexts. For instance, harm is often related to socio-political understandings of witchcraft and poisoning which, as she presents in her 2015 book, translated to the colonial persecution of ‘therapeutic rebels’ who were using the injustice of colonial harm to organize against the Belgian colonists in colonial Congo.
Following the trope of harm, Dr. Hunt describes how the concept is driving her approach to her next project: a 110-page book on the world history of medicine. While most medical historians are fascinated by pathogens and how they spread, Dr. Hunt is challenging herself to, not only take on this enormous task within such a confined page limit, but also to get beyond somatic disease by including the history of psychological sufferings and asylums. She will focus on a range of practices that can be described as healing, diagnostic, curative, medical, harmful, and so on. Her final chapter will connect the past to the present, discussing present-day vehicles of harm from refugee camps to cancer wards to fast food restaurants.