John M. Janzen

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.

He then shifted his focus to North Africa and the Middle East, enrolling in a program in Arabic and Islamic Culture with Mushin Madhi of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

Between 1964 and 1966, Janzen conducted fieldwork in the lower Congo region, examining the social and political organization, economic development, religion, health, and patterns of healthcare seeking among the Kongo people.

Janzen returned home in 1966 to complete his dissertation, titled Elemental Categories, Symbols, and Ideas of Association in Kongo-Manianga Society.

In 1969 he received a Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship and returned to the lower Congo/Zaire region to complete a study on Kongo therapeutics.

In 1974, Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey published An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (KU Publications in Anthropology 1974).

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).

The "drum of affliction" paradigm, a translation of the proto and pan-Bantu word ngoma, was further explored in his work on Central and Southern Africa, facilitated by a lectureship at the University of Cape Town.

In 1994–1995, Janzen conducted research in the post-genocide Great Lakes Region of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Zaire/Congo, resulting in Do I Still have a Life?