John M. Janzen

John M. Janzen (far left) at Izirangabo refugee camp

John M. Janzen (born October 28, 1937) is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. His research focuses on health, illness, and healing practices in Southern and Central Africa.

Biography

John M. Janzen was born to Hilda Gertrude Neufeldt and Louis Abraham Janzen on October 28, 1937 in Newton, Kansas. He is the second of four children, and one of three boys in his family. He is married to Reinhild Kauenhoven and has three children.

After graduating from high school at Berean Academy, he attended Bethel College for four years. Here he met his future wife, Reinhild Kauenhoven, a fellow student from Goettingen, Germany. After his second year in school, Janzen joined the PAX program of the Mennonite Central Committee where he served for two years as an alternative to U.S. military service. During this time, Janzen worked on projects involving education, and helped in the construction of a hospital in the late colonial setting of the South Savannah of Belgian Congo. Returning home, Janzen pursued a graduate degree in anthropology. He graduated from Bethel College in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in Social Science and Philosophy, and was accepted at the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology.

After a first year taking the core courses in anthropology at Chicago, Janzen benefited from a French Government grant to attend the University of Paris (Sorbonne), from which he received a certificate of African Studies in 1963. Fearing that Central Africa would be closed to field research because of political unrest, Janzen shifted his focus to North Africa and the Middle East, and to a course program in Arabic and Islamic Culture with Mushin Madhi of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Janzen received an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in May 1964, and began his PhD at the University of Chicago soon after. He married Kauenhoven the same year.

Between 1964 and 1966, Janzen traveled to the lower Congo region, where he examined the social and political organization, economic development, religion, health, and patterns of health care seeking among the Kongo peoples. Here, Janzen’s research took on a historical perspective, as he used the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial mercantile trade of the 16th to late 19th centuries to illustrate how the trade contributed to shaping Kongo perceptions of health, suffering, and healing from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. Janzen returned home in 1966 to complete his dissertation, titled "Elemental Categories, Symbols, and Ideas of Association in Kongo-Manianga Society." He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in June 1967.

Professional life

Janzen returned to Newton, Kansas and began teaching as an assistant professor at Bethel College from 1967 to 1968. In 1969 he received the Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship and returned to the lower Congo/Zaire region to complete a study on Kongo therapeutics. He began teaching as an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal in late 1969. It was here that Janzen was first exposed to semiotics. He looked for ways to connect materiality with ideas and symbols in a continuum, and looked into the work of Victor Turner, who resolved the relation between materiality, consciousness, and ideas, without fixating on any one particular aspect. Janzen also began reading Roland Barthes' books on semiotics.

In summer 1970, Janzen spent a month in Sweden working on Lower Congo archival materials. He returned to his teaching position at McGill and remained there until 1972, when he received an offer as associate professor in socio-cultural anthropology and African studies from the University of Kansas. In 1974, Janzen published with Wyatt MacGaffey "An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire" (KU Publications in Anthropology 1974).

During his time at the University of Kansas, Janzen published "The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire" (California, 1978), reissued in paperback as "The Quest for Therapy: Medical Pluralism in Lower Zaire" (1982) and in French translation as "La quête de la thérapie au Bas-Zaïre" (Karthala, 1995). This was based on Janzen’s Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship, as well as a two-year seminar taught at McGill. The book, which examined the foundations of Equatorial African approaches to sickness and healing from African and Western-derived biomedical therapies, received the Wellcome Medal and Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for anthropological research pertaining to medical issues. Eventually the previous series editor, Professor Charles Leslie of the University of California Press, asked him to become editor of the "Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care" journal, a position he accepted.

While still teaching at the University of Kansas, Janzen received the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for his study on the Western Equatorial African historic Lemba cult traces in Western European museums. Janzen’s research of the Lemba, which he described as a cult for elite men and women emphasizing alliance building through marriage, trade, and healing, led to the publication of his book "Lemba (1650–1930): A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the new World" (1982). In this book, Janzen identifies the sickness of the Lemba as resulting from subordinate's envy of the mercantile elite’s wealth. The drum of affliction, a translation of the proto and pan-Bantu word ngoma, typically includes a mode of affliction, a network of those commonly afflicted, visitation on them by an ancestor or spirit who has experienced the same affliction, and ritual event that brings together healers, the commonly afflicted, and their families in rhythmic, song-dance, therapeutic activity. The drum of affliction paradigm had been explored earlier by Victor Turner's work in the Southern Savannah.

Janzen's work on the Ngoma paradigm led to further exploration of the phenomenon by expanding his research into Central and Southern Africa. He traveled to much of the Eastern and Western Bantu areas of Africa. His position as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town facilitated his access to information and contacts. He published Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa in 1992. Another aspect of Janzen’s work during this time was the tracing of Kongo culture to the New World.

In 1991, Janzen and his wife, Reinhild, co-authored a book, which was the catalogue of a special exhibit at the museum, titled "Mennonite Furniture: A Migrant Tradition 1766-1910". Janzen became involved in Mennonite history during a 1989 sabbatical, when he and his wife traced the regions from the Netherlands to the Baltic Seacoast.

Janzen’s work on African healing continued to expand when in 1994–1995, he was asked to travel to the post-genocide Great Lakes Region of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Zaire/Congo. This led to another book; Do I Still have a Life? Voices from the Aftermath of War in Rwanda and Burundi (2001), a comparison of the actions of ordinary people and leaders in several communes in Rwanda and Burundi leading up to, and following, the war and genocide.

His work at the University of Kansas developed into a concentration on African Medical Anthropology, involving work with war, trauma, healing, semiotics, socio-cultural anthropology, and medical anthropology. During this time, Janzen published "The Social Fabric of Health: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology" (2002).

In 2013, Janzen did a project on postcolonial health in the Lower Congo. With the support of the IIE-Fulbright Program he and his wife spent four months in the Congo riverside town of Luozi to conduct research. His research was facilitated by the Free University of Luozi, with special help from the university rector, Dr. Kimpianga Mahaniah. An analysis of this research work was enhanced with a residency in 2014 at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Research findings and interpretations will be published in the monograph "Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo" (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).

Publications

Books

• 1974: Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire. KU Publ. in Anthropology # 5, Lawrence. 163 pp. (with Wyatt MacGaffey)
• 1978: The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley & London. University of California Press, 267 pp. (with collab. Wm. Arkinstall) Paperback edition, 1982.
• 1979: The Social History of Disease and Medicine in Africa. Special Issue: Social Science and Medicine 13B, 268 pp., (with Steven Feierman)
• 1980: The Development of Health. Akron, Pa., Mennonite Central Committee (Development Monograph 8), March., 32 pp.
• 1981: Causality and Classification in African Medicine and Health. Special Issue: Social Science and Medicine, 15B,3, 268 pp. (with Gwyn Prins)
• 1982: "Lemba (1650–1930): A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the new World". New York, Garland Publ., 383 pp.
• 1991: "Mennonite Furniture: A Migrant Tradition 1766–1910". Intercourse, PA: Good Books.
• 1992: "The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa", ed. with Steve Feierman, University of California Press.
• 1992: "Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa". University of California Press.
• 1995: "Quête de la Guérison dans le Bas-Zaïre". Paris: Karthala.
• 1999: "The Architecture of Anabaptist-Mennonite Spaces and Places of Meeting and Worship". Proceedings of an International Conference October 16–18, 1997, Harleysville PA. Special Issue of "Mennonite Quarterly Review", April. (Editor with David Rempel-Smucker).
• 2000: "Do I still have a life? Voices from the aftermath of war in Rwanda and Burundi, 1994-1995". KU Monographs in "Anthropology #20". with Reinhild Janzen.
• 2001: "The Social Fabric of Health: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology". New York: McGraw-Hill.
• 2008: "Global Medical Anthropology in the U.S. Heartland". Editor, Special issue, Viennese Ethnomedicine Newsletter, Feb. & June (2&3).
• 2009: "A Carved Loango Tlusk: Local Images and Global Connections". KU Monographs in Anthropology 24.
• 2014: "Medical Anthropology in Global Africa". Eds. Kathryn Rhine, J.M.Janzen, Glenn Adams, Heather Aldersey. KU Publications in Anthropology 26.
• 2019: "Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo". Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.