The Annual Invitational Lecture of the Society for the Humanities is designed to give a Cornell audience a chance to hear one of our distinguished Cornell humanities faculty members who may frequently speak at other universities, but whom we seldom have the privilege of hearing.

This year's Society Invitational Lecture, "Healing in a Toxic World: Reimagining the Times and Spaces of the Therapeutic" will be delivered by Stacey A. Langwick (Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts & Sciences). 

Read "Medical anthropologist to deliver annual Society for Humanities lecture" to learn more about the talk and Langwick's work. 

What does it mean to heal in a toxic world? How is that which counts as “therapeutic” shifting with the growing acknowledgment that the extractive relations fueling contemporary economies and animating modern life undermine possibilities for future survival? In Tanzania, this double-bind defining our contemporary moment is forging creative responses that reimagine the territorial and the corporeal, posing configurations of care that invite alternative forms of sovereignty in the service of both ecological and bodily healing. Social-therapeutic projects are challenging the ways that “health” conceptualizes and governs the entanglement of bodies and ecologies. A charismatic banana, kitarasa, has emerged as a key player in both entrepreneurial and nongovernmental experiments striving to heal bodies and soils in a world where that which enables survival in the near term, undermines it for future generations. Articulating the efficacy of kitarasa, and the social-therapeutic projects in which it is entangled, requires decentering 19^th and 20^th century articulations of toxicity and its relation with remedy. The story of Dorkia Enterprises, a small business, working to commercialize kitarasa flour as a “therapeutic” food reveals the tensions between the economic and the ecological, as it is caught up in efforts to heal land and bodies. Animated by connections to international food sovereignty initiatives, it reimagines the scalar work of economy and disrupts the forms of property on which it depends. This talk moves between (1) Dorkia Enterprises’ elaboration of kitarasa through partial engagements with the state and the market and (2) an effort to think with kitarasa and the liveliness in its insistent excesses of these logics. As this charismatic banana folds the scales of bodies and lands into one another, it incites the theorizing of relations among toxicity, healing, and memory.

This talk is drawn from Langwick’s forthcoming book Medicines That Feed Us. If you are interested in pre-ordering the book, you are invited to use the  coupon code E26LNGWK on the Duke University Press’s website for 30% off the paperback edition. 

Stacey A. Langwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her most recent book Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing and Sovereignty in a Toxic World is forthcoming from Duke University Press (Feb 2026). She is also author of Bodies, Politics and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (2011) and co-editor of Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa (2012). Her ethnographic work has led to co-leading a collaborative international design project that invites a rethinking and reworking of healing on and of the planet in the face of climate change. Uzima: Wellness has begun with the cultivation of a teaching, research, and healing garden that reimagines medicine’s land relations in a major teaching-research hospital in Tanzania. The land-based pedagogy emerging from this project offers the garden as a as a central site of medical training, together with the clinic, classroom, and laboratory. Prof. Langwick teaches classes on medicine and healing, the body and bodiliness, toxicity, postcolonial science, critical plant studies and anthropological methods.