Introduction

The introduction describes dawa lishe, medicines that feed us, through the collective efforts of Tanzanians who are caring for bodies and lands simultaneously. Their work is more than a social-ecological way of addressing chronic disease; it is also a theoretical provocation and a practical invitation to work collectively toward a radical revisioning of health and a redefinition of healing. Starting from a moment in which toxicity is a condition of everyday life, dawa lishe pries open the narrow space of response delineated by contemporary configurations of science, law, and economy. Drawing on the layered histories of knowing and forms of embodiment that shape how Tanzanians approach healing, it offers grounded techniques for denaturalizing liberal versions of bodily and territorial sovereignty and opens up methods through which to render ongoing dispossession visible, chronic depletion and persistent injury actionable, and otherwise ways of living a mode of theorizing.