John M. Janzen - Graduate Education

Graduate Education

Janzen spent his first year in an intensive study of Arabic and Islamic social and political thought with Mushin Madhi, a political philosopher, at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Madhi, a highly educated Arab originally from Baghdad, specialized in medieval Islamic political thought including the work of Averroes, Avecinna, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Khaldun. His work further motivated Janzen to pursue a career in ethnography and anthropology.

The following year, John 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. This experience would resurface in his later works on African health and healing. John returned home to complete his graduate studies and finish his Master’s thesis titled: Towards a History of Cultural Revitalization among the Bakongo: 1880-1925. John 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 also married his undergraduate love, Reinhild Kauenhoven, the same year. She has since then provided John with a strong sense of support, accompanied him during his fieldwork in the lower Congo, and eventually, co-authored two books with him.

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.