Nancy Andoh

Project Title

“Beyond Colonial Archives: Women Healers, Shrine Knowledge, and Therapeutic Authority in Northern Ghana”

Project Description

This dissertation demonstrates that male-dominated healing in Northern Ghana was a colonial invention — between 1900 and the 1950s, colonial administrations deployed gender restrictions as a technology of governance, displacing women who were the primary custodians of mental health and reproductive care. Drawing on shrine ethnography, it recovers the clandestine networks through which women preserved this knowledge, revealing shrines as living archives of what colonial records tried to erase.