Spring 2023 Fellow

I hold a PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, awarded in 2012. Between 2013 and 2016, I was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I am currently an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department for the Study of Culture and Society at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, USA.

I have conducted fieldwork research among the Makhuwa and Makonde people of Nampula city, in northern Mozambique, since 2005. My writing has explored the work and life of spirit healers in the wider cultural and social contextof northern Mozambique, and in relation to religion, history, violence, kinship, and statepower.

My research adheres to a tradition in anthropology of being a repeat researcher, over many years, to a prescribed place and to the same social actors. This has allowed me to record transformations in the socio-political context of the city and in the life-trajectories of the people I have been working with.

This perspective informs my first book, At Ansha’s. Life at the Mosque of a Spirit Healer in Northern Mozambique, that I published for the Medical Anthropology Series at Rutgers University Press. The book follows a tradition of ethnographic writing that foregrounds a single story as a point of entry for understanding an entire cultural and social world. AtAnsha’stakes the reader inside the hut of a female healer (her “spirit mosque”) in Nampula, where Ansha cures the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses fragments of her illness story, and engages the world outside her mosque. Structured around a series of events which occurred in Ansha’s spirit mosque, the book situates her story in relation to Mozambican history, the legacy of violence, structural adjustment programs, global and national health policies, and transformations in global Islam and Christianity.

My commitment to a certain model of ethnographic fieldwork is also reflected in published peer-review articles and ongoing research on competing Islamic discourses, the coexistence of Islam and matriliny, traditional understandings of and responses to children’s ailments, religious change, and memory.

I am currently working on a second book project, provisionally entitled “Spirituality, Memory and Power among the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique”. The book project focuses on a variety of discourses on and practices around spirit mediumship – illness narratives, spirit stories, religious conversion, family genealogies, healing sessions, private and public rituals, personal accounts of magic warfare – all analyzed as forms of historical consciousness through which Makhuwa mediums, and their patients not only reconnect with their ancient past but also refashion Mozambique’s recent historical events into their own history.

"At Ansha’s: Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique” (Medical Anthropology Series, Rutgers University Press, 2021) 

“Resisting deliverance. Majini spirits, matriliny and religious change in northern Mozambique”. In Fancello, S., & Gusman, A. (Eds.) Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa: Deliverance in Muslim and Christian Worlds (Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies). London: Bloomsbury (2022) pp. 91-108.

“I Am a Man of Both Sides: Female Power and Islam in the Life and Work of a Spirit Healer in Northern Mozambique”.International Feminist Journal of Politics23/2 (2021): 198–220.

“Muslims of the Mosque, Muslim of the Spirits: Competing Ideas of Being Muslim in Northern Mozambique.”Journal for Islamic Studies 35 (2016): 70–106.

“The Night War of Nampula: Vulnerable Children, Social Change, and Spiritual Insecurity in Northern Mozambique.”Africa, the Journal of the International Institute 86/3 (2016): 528–551.