John M. Janzen - Professional Life

Professional Life

Janzen returned to Newton, Kansas and began teaching as an assistant professor at Bethel College from 1967-1968. In 1969, however, Janzen 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 Barth's 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 titled: Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (KU Publications 1974).

During his time at the University of Kansas, Janzen published the book, 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 writing 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 his 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.

His work on the Ngoma paradigm led to further exploration of the phenomenon by expanding his research into Central and Southern Africa. After receiving a KU sabbatical, a lectureship at the University of Cape Town, and a Senior Fulbright Research Fellowship, Janzen traveled to much of the Eastern and Western Bantu areas of Africa, including Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Kinshasa in Western Zaire, Cape Town in South Africa, and Mbabane in Swaziland. 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, which was briefly mentioned in his book on the Lemba, 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. He organized a conference on the anthropology of Mennonite places of worship in the United States. Also, the recreation of ideas and institutions influenced Janzen’s work as an anthropologist, and motivated him to be involved in the Kauffman Museum located in North Newton, at Bethel College, by helping to raise money for the creation of a permanent exhibit. 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. Their research also took them to Russia in 1991, and Paraguay and Brazil in 1993.

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" published in 2001. The book, based on many interviews, is 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 another great work titled: The Social Fabric of Health: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology (2002). From 2000 to 2003, Janzen received grants from the Department of Education for his work with the African Studies Center at the University of Kansas totaling over 1 million dollars. He also received the Jeffrey’s Social Sciences & Humanities Research Achievement Award from the University of Kansas in 2003. Dr. John Janzen has been invited to prestigious universities such as Harvard and the Medizinische Universitaet in Vienna as a distinguished guest lecturer. Over the years, he has published numerous works in scholarly journals distributed across the world, and has published on issues ranging from Mennonite architecture to Ngoma healing in Africa.