John M Janzen

Biography

John M. Janzen was born to Hilda Gertrude Neufeldt and Louis Abraham Janzen on October 28, 1937, in the town of Newton in Central 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 graduation from Berean Academy in Butler County, Kansas, he attended Bethel College in Harvey County, Kansas 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.

Janzen spent his first year in an intensive study of Arabic and Islamic social and political thought with Mushin Madhi, a political philosopher who specialized in medieval Islamic political thought, at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Madhi's work further motivated Janzen to pursue a career in ethnography and anthropology. The following year, Janzen received a grant from the French government to attend the University of Paris (Sorbonne), from which he received a certificate of African Studies in 1963. His stay in a predominantly Structuralist and Marxist France influenced Janzen’s ideology and led him to the belief that material existence shapes societies and ideas. Janzen rejected the notion of a solely symbolic anthropology. 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 1967-1968. 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 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 1970, Janzen took a break from teaching and traveled to Europe, where he 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 his first book, Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (KU Publications 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).

Selected awards and grants

Publications

Selected articles