"Too much studying makes me crazy": School-related illnesses on Mount Kilimanjaro

Comparative Education Review

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 497-512

  Stambach, Amy ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 22444454453     PISSN: 00104086     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/447525     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. School-related illnesses have been described in other settings. Anne Locke Davidson, talking about academic performance in the United States, notes that "craziness" stands out as a cultural marker for defiance of school authority (Making and Molding Identity in Schools: Student Narratives on Race, Gender and Academic Engagement [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996], pp. 109-33).
2. Thomas P. Rohlen, in his discussion of student suicide, describes the tensions of low-achieving Japanese students who are caught between pressures to succeed in school and feelings of guilt and shame (Japan's High Schools [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983], pp. 327-34).
3. Charles Stafford, looking at the cultural context in which Taiwanese children are raised, notes that difference between the moral order of home life and the competitiveness of schooling fuel arguments about the maddening effects of education (The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification in Angang [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], p. 1).
4. See Robert E. Bartholomew and Francois Sirois, "Epidemic Hysteria in Schools: An International and Historical Overview," Educational Studies 22, no. 3 (October 1996): 285-311;
5. H. Aro and V. Taipale, "The Impact of Timing of Puberty on Psychosomatic Symptoms among Fourteen- to Sixteen-Year-Old Finnish Girls," Child Development 58 (Fall 1987): 261-68.
6. Bartholomew and Sirois, pp. 291-92.
7. Kangmin Zeng, "Prayer, Luck, and Spiritual Strength: The Desecularization of the Entrance Examination Systems in East Asia," Comparative Education Review 40, no. 3 (August 1996): 264-79.
8. Philip Foster argued as much 4 decades ago when he called upon comparative researchers to study the cultural contexts of African education ("Comparative Methodology and the Study of African Education," Comparative Education Review 4, no. 2 [October 1960]: 111-17).
9. For a sample of works that have followed Foster's appeal, see Caroline Bledsoe, "The Cultural Transformation of Western Education in Sierra Leone," Africa 62, no. 2 (1992): 182-202;
10. Maurice Bloch, "The Uses of Schooling and Literacy in a Zafimaniry Village," in Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, ed. Brian V. Street (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 87-109;
11. Jean Lave, "Cognitive Consequences of Traditional Apprenticeship in West Africa," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1977): 177-79;
12. Ladi Semali, Post-literacy in the Age of Democracy: A Comparative Study of China and Tanzania (Bethesda, Md.: Austin & Winfield, 1995) ;
13. Robert Serpell, The Significance of Schooling: Life-Journeys in an African Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
14. C. N. Ubah, "Western Education in Africa: The Igbo Experience, 1900-1960," Comparative Education Review 24, no. 3 (August 1980): 317-88.
15. Among this literature, see Bloch; Serpell; and Colin Swatridge, Delivering the Goods: Education as Cargo in Papua New Guinea (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).
16. Robert F. Arnove, "Education as Contested Terrain in Nicaragua," Comparative Education Review 39, no. 1 (February 1995): 28-53;
17. Noel F. McGinn, "Education, Democratization, and Globalization: A Challenge for Comparative Education," Comparative Education Review 40, no. 4 (November 1996): 341-57;
18. Anthea Taylor, "Education for Democracy: Assimilation or Emancipation for Aboriginal Australians?" Comparative Education Review 40, no. 4 (November 1996): 426-38.
19. Kichaa is not a unitary phenomenon. Readers familiar with the Kiswahili language will recognize from the following discussion that people living on Mount Kilimanjaro gloss a number of related afflictions within the category kichaa, including kupandwa na wazimu (to be possessed), hulogwa (to be bewitched), and kutobalehe (not to develop sexually). Attending to the subtleties of difference among these afflictions is beyond the scope of this article, as is looking at the manifestations of kichaa outside the context of schooling.
20. This estimation is based on tabulations from a household survey I conducted in Ndala and Foo villages (n = 400). Ndala and Foo are pseudonyms.
21. Tanzanian Development Research Group (TADREG), Parents' Attitudes towards Education in Rural Tanzania, Research Report (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam, Department of Education, 1993);
22. Remi Clignet and Philip Foster, The Fortunate Few: A Study of Secondary Schools and Students in the Ivory Coast (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966).
23. Ministry of Education and Culture, Basic Education Statistics in Tanzania: From Four Examination Results in Percentages by Division, 1900-1994, Public and Private Secondary Schools (Dar es Salaam: Ministry of Education and Culture, 1995), table 2.3.
24. Case materials and narrative excerpts in this article come from semistructured interviews conducted in late 1991 through early 1993 and during a return visit in 1996. Recorded interviews were conducted either in Kiswahili or Kimachame (the latter is the local dialect in Foo and Ndala villages) and then transcribed by one of several assistants: Sarah Samueli Kwayu, Flora Popenoe, Joyce Lyimo, and Lucy Mule. Unrecorded interviews were conducted either in English or Kiswahili and have been reconstructed from my notes. Interviews are referred to in the article as INT/informant number. Information about Isaria Lyimo comes from INT/92360.
25. INT/92361.
26. See chap. 5, pp. 81-89, in John M. Janzen, The Quest for Therapy: Medical Pluralism in Lower Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978);
27. Shula Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987);
28. Raymond Prince, "The 'Brain Fag' Syndrome in Nigerian Students," Journal of Mental Science 106 (April 1960): 559-70.
29. For personal descriptions of schooling's alienating aspects, see Bessie Head, "Notes from a Quiet Backwater," in A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings by Bessie Head, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1990);
30. Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (Johannesburg: Raven, 1985);
31. Gillian Stead Eilersen, Bessie Head: Thunder behind Her Ears (London: Heinemann, 1995).
32. Robert B. Edgerton, "Conceptions of Psychosis in Four East African Societies," American Anthropologist 68, no. 2 (April 1966): 408-25.
33. American Anthropologist Ibid., p. 410.
34. INT/96272.
35. The notion that schooling can lead one conceptually far beyond one's natal household is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. The sentiment is more frequently associated with boys, who generally are expected to reside virilocally, than with girls, whose movements away from the natal household are seen to be a "normal part of the developmental process. But I have heard it applied occasionally to both sexes. Camara Laye's classic novel The African Child (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1954; reprint, 1987) portrays a French-Guinean schoolboy who reevaluates his identity when he is accepted to a university in Paris.
36. Anthony Appiah in the preface to In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (London: Methuen, 1992) reflects on education's role in defining and shaping his cultural identity.
37. See also Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions: A Novel (Seattle: Seal, 1988); and Marks.
38. INT/92242.
39. INT/92138.
40. That Caroline Bledsoe describes a similar phenomenon among Mende students living in Sierra Leone suggests that belief in the effects of elders' blessings on students' performances is widespread. See Bledsoe (n. 5 above).
41. INT/9267D.
42. Like the concepts femininity and masculinity, tradition and modernity are not discrete entities but cultural symbols that people deploy at various times to make arguments about exclusion and difference. On the hybrid nature of identity, see Kirin Narayan, "How Native Is a 'Native' Anthropologist?" American Anthropologist 95 (1966): 671-86;
43. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
44. "Mysterious Disease Hits Mpanda School," Daily News (April 2, 1992), p. 1.
45. "Hysteria Affects Mwanza Students," Daily News (May 25, 1972), p. 5.
46. Similar stories are recorded in the Tanzanian National Archives and in popular literature on adolescents. See, e.g., E. Kezilahabi, Rosa Mistica (Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press, 1988).
47. Frances Vavrus, who conducted research on girls' education and international development initiatives on Mount Kilimanjaro in 1996, notes similar beliefs in her field notes (Frances Vavrus, personal communication, December 12, 1997).
48. Flora Popenoe, e-mail correspondence, April 23, 1997.
49. Two classic examples of this anthropological work in East Africa are Luc de Heusch, "Heat, Physiology, and Cosmogony," in Explorations in Africa Systems of Thought, ed. Ivan Karp and Charles Bird (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 1980), pp. 27-43;
50. Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).
51. Flora Popenoe, e-mail correspondence.
52. Candice Bradley, "Women's Empowerment and Fertility Decline in Western Kenya," in Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry, ed. Susan Greenhalgh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 157-78;
53. Frances Vavrus, "Schooling, Empowerment, and the Politics of Population: A Case Study from Kilimanjaro, Tanzania" (paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Columbus, November 13-16, 1997).
54. Since at least the 1940s, schooling has been an integral means for controlling reproduction in Africa. That this remains one of its many functions is evident in the domestic-science syllabus, which includes lessons on mothering, dressmaking, nutrition, and cooking. According to the syllabus, students are supposed to appreciate the benefits of having fewer children by learning to value a material standard of living that can be obtained in this way rather than by being taught birth-control methods. Indeed, lessons on contraception are notably absent from the syllabus.
55. INT/92570.
56. INT/9253D.
57. For a discussion of boys' schooling experiences, see Amy Stambach, "'Seeded' in the Market Economy: Schooling and Social Transformations on Mount Kilimanjaro," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1996): 545-67.
58. See Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), p. 11.
59. For psychological approaches to school-related disturbances, see the American Psychiatric Association, "Somastisation Disorder," in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), pp. 446-50.
60. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994);
61. Anthony Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage, 1972).
62. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "The Madman and the Migrant," in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, ed. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), pp. 155-78.
63. Arnove (n. 7 above); Bloch (n. 5 above); and Serpell (n. 5 above).
64. The CIES meeting was "Bringing Culture Back In," in Buffalo, N.Y., March 18-22, 1998.
65. This subfield has a small but important contingency. For examples, see Brad Levinson, Douglas Foley and Dorothy Holland, eds., The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996):
66. Deborah Reed-Danahay, Education and Identity in Rural France: The Politics of Schooling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
67. Vandra Masemann, "Anthropological Approaches to Comparative Education," Comparative Education Review 20, no. 3 (October 1976): 368-80.