ABSTRACT
Attention to violence and trauma healing as seen in this work expanded John Janzen’s understanding of distinctively African forms of social healing, ritual renewal, and institutional legitimation. These generalized and comparative research paradigms, applied in research and teaching, were enriched by the Janzens’s (John and Reinhild) short-term assignment with Mennonite Central Committee in the Great Lakes region following the Rwandan genocide and civil war. Field research in the Lower Congo and in an arc of urban sites in Central, East, and Southern Africa contributed to a specialization on the changing character of African health and healing. The Congo Pax program was pivotal in launching Janzen’s career in Africanist anthropology. College professors, community peers, graduate school mentors, students and professional colleagues, and fieldwork informants and subject-experts encouraged his continuing scholarship and research in matters of affliction, diagnosis, healing, and institutional development in multiple African settings.
