
John M. Janzen

John M. Janzen is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. He has been a leading figure on issues of health, illness, and healing in Southern and Central Africa since the 1960s and has dedicated much of his career to providing a better understanding of African society. Janzen’s knowledge of the Kikongo language and his intermittent visits to the lower Congo region between 1964 and 2013 have paved the way for a contextual understanding of the roots of Western Equatorial African approaches to sickness and healing, combining African and Western derived biomedical therapies. Janzen’s research has expanded to include other African countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Senegal, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Sudan. He is the former director of the Kansas African Studies Center at the University of Kansas. .
Biography.
John M. Janzen was born to Hilda Gertrude Neufeldt and Louis Abraham Janzen on October 28, 1937 in Newton, Kansas. He is the second of four children, and one of three boys in his family. He is married to Reinhild Kauenhoven and has three children.
Upon high school graduation from Berean Academy, he attended Bethel College for four years. Here he met his future wife, Reinhild Kauenhoven, a then student-colleague from Göttingen, Germany. After his second year in school, Janzen joined the PAX program of the Mennonite Central Committee that took him to Africa for two years of service in lieu of joining the U.S. military. During this time, Janzen worked on projects involving education, and helped in the construction of a hospital in the late colonial setting of the South Savannah of Belgian Congo. It was during this time that Janzen became interested in learning more about Africa. Returning home, Janzen pursued a graduate degree in anthropology. He graduated from Bethel College in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in Social Science and Philosophy, and was accepted to the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology.
After a first year taking the core courses in anthropology at Chicago, Janzen benefited from a French Government grant to attend the University of Paris (Sorbonne), from which he received a certificate of African Studies in 1963. Fearing that Central Africa would be closed to field research because of political unrest, Janzen shifted his focus to North Africa and the Middle East, and to a course program in Arabic and Islamic Culture with Mushin Madhi of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Janzen received an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in May 1964, and began his PhD at the University of Chicago soon after. John married Kauenhoven, the same year.
Between 1964 and 1966, John traveled to the lower Congo region, where he examined the social and political organization, economic development, religion, health, and patterns of health care seeking among the Kongo peoples. Here, Janzen’s research took on a historical perspective, as he used the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial mercantile trade of the 16th to late 19th centuries to illustrate how the trade contributed to shaping Kongo perceptions of health, suffering, and healing from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. Janzen returned home in 1966 to complete his dissertation, titled "Elemental Categories, Symbols, and Ideas of Association in Kongo-Manianga Society." He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in June 1967.
Professional life.
Janzen returned to Newton, Kansas and began teaching as an assistant professor at Bethel College from 1967 to 1968. In 1969 he received the Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship and returned to the lower Congo/Zaire region to complete a study on Kongo therapeutics. He began teaching as an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal in late 1969. It was here that Janzen was first exposed to semiotics. He looked for ways to connect materiality with ideas and symbols in a continuum, and looked into the work of Victor Turner, who resolved the relation between materiality, consciousness, and ideas, without fixating on any one particular aspect. Janzen also began reading Roland Barthes' books on semiotics and grew highly interested in the field.
In summer 1970, Janzen spent a month in Sweden working on Lower Congo archival materials. He returned to his teaching position at McGill and remained there until 1972, when he received an offer as associate professor in socio-cultural anthropology and African studies from the University of Kansas. In 1974, Janzen published with Wyatt MacGaffey "An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire" (KU Publications in Anthropology 1974).
During his time at the University of Kansas, Janzen published "The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire" (California, 1978), reissued in paperback as "The Quest for Therapy: Medical Pluralism in Lower Zaire" (1982) and in French translation as "La quête de la thérapie au Bas-Zaïre" (Karthala, 1995). This was based on Janzen’s Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship, as well as a two-year seminar taught at McGill. The book, which examined the foundations of Equatorial African approaches to sickness and healing from African and Western-derived biomedical therapies, received the Wellcome Medal and Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for anthropological research pertaining to medical issues. Eventually the previous series editor, Professor Charles Leslie of the University of California Press, asked him to become editor of the "Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care" journal, a position he accepted.
While still teaching at the University of Kansas, Janzen received the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for his study on the Western Equatorial African historic Lemba cult traces in Western European museums. Janzen’s research of the Lemba, which he described as a cult for elite men and women emphasizing alliance building through marriage, trade, and healing, led to the publication of his book "Lemba (1650–1930): A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the new World" (1982). In this book, Janzen identifies the sickness of the Lemba as resulting from subordinate's envy of the mercantile elite’s wealth. The drum of affliction, a translation of the proto and pan-Bantu word "ngoma", typically includes a mode of affliction, a network of those commonly afflicted, visitation on them by an ancestor or spirit who has experienced the same affliction, and ritual event that brings together healers, the commonly afflicted, and their families in rhythmic, song-dance, therapeutic activity. The drum of affliction paradigm had been explored earlier by Victor Turner's work in the Southern Savannah.
Janzen's work on the Ngoma paradigm led to further exploration of the phenomenon by expanding his research into Central and Southern Africa. He traveled to much of the Eastern and Western Bantu areas of Africa. His position as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town facilitated his access to information and contacts. He published "Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa" in 1992. Another aspect of Janzen’s work during this time was the tracing of Kongo culture to the New World.
Also dedicated to his research on the Mennonites, Janzen remained actively involved in Mennonite affairs. In 1991, Janzen and his wife, Reinhild, co-authored a book, which was the catalogue of a special exhibit at the museum, titled "Mennonite Furniture: A Migrant Tradition 1766-1910". Janzen became heavily involved in Mennonite history during a 1989 sabbatical, when he and his wife traced the regions from the Netherlands to the Baltic Seacoast.
Janzen’s work on African healing continued to expand when in 1994–1995, he was asked to travel to the post-genocide Great Lakes Region of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Zaire/Congo. This led to another book; Do I Still have a Life? Voices from the Aftermath of War in Rwanda and Burundi (2001), a comparison of the actions of ordinary people and leaders in several communes in Rwanda and Burundi leading up to, and following, the war and genocide.
His work at the University of Kansas soon developed into a concentration on African Medical Anthropology, involving work with war, trauma, healing, semiotics, socio-cultural anthropology, and medical anthropology. During this time, Janzen published "The Social Fabric of Health: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology" (2002).
In 2013 Janzen undertook a field research project on postcolonial health in the Lower Congo. With the support of the IIE-Fulbright Program he and Reinhild Kauenhoven Janzen spent four months in the Congo riverside town of Luozi to conduct this research. His research was facilitated by the Free University of Luozi, with special help from the university rector, Dr. Kimpianga Mahaniah. An analysis of this research work was enhanced with a residency in 2014 at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Research findings and interpretations will be published in the monograph "Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo" (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).