Claiming Territory: Medical Mission, Interreligious Revivalism, and the Spatialization of Health Interventions in Urban Tanzania

Abstract

Over the past decades, new religious actors have become involved in the provision of medical care in urban Tanzania. Muslim revivalist organizations and neo-Pentecostal churches in particular have established a range of health interventions that are tied to revisionist claims about religion, spirituality, and politics in society. In this article I discuss medical mission in Dar es Salaam in the light of (post)colonial histories of health service provision as well as with regard to inter- and intradenominational contestations over health and well-being, a morally acceptable life, and political participation. I argue that the nature of the inscription of revivalist organizations in urban space through health interventions depends on their structural location and their respective members' social and economic capital. I also show that the ongoing transformations of urban space through medical mission have become reflective of, as well as are triggering, moral interpretations of history and social inequality in contemporary Tanzania.

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