Dr. Denver Davids
Department of Sociology and Anthropology HOD and Senior Lecturer
Denver Davids is a Senior Lecturer whose research interests are centered in the following areas: the investigation and documentation of the use of traditional herbal medicine (THM) among traditional health practitioners (THP’s), bossiesdoktors, Rastafari bush doctors and local people in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces, South Africa. He has researched and published on topics including the relationship between people and plants, plant conservation, THP’s perceptions of HIV/TB, local and scientific knowledge in relation to medicinal plants and communicable and non-communicable diseases such as common cold, COPD, TB, cancer, Type 2 Diabetes mellitus and Hypertension.
Dr Davids currently teaches undergraduate students and supervises postgraduates at M and D level.
Modules
** Understanding cultural diversity A (SAV101)
** Marriage, kinship and the family in cross-cultural perspective (SAV212)
** Applied cultural knowledge (SAV311)
** Medical Anthropology (SMA202)
Research focus
** Medical anthropology;
** Indigenous Knowledge;
** Anthropology of Herbal Science, and Ethnobotany
** Traditional Medicine and Healing in Southern Africa
Selected Publications, (as at April 2021)
Davids, D. (2013). Medicine and the politics of knowledge: A review. Anthropology Southern Africa Volume 36(1&2).
Davids, D. et al. (2014). Traditional health practitioners’ perceptions, herbal treatment and management of HIV and related opportunistic infections. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2014, 10:77.
Davids, D. et al. (2015). An ethnobotanical survey of medicinal plants used by traditional health practitioners to manage HIV and its related opportunistic infections in Mpoza, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Journal of ethnopharmacology 171 (2015) 109-115.
Davids, D. et al. (2016). Ethnobotanical survey of medicinal plants used to manage High Blood Pressure and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Bitterfontein, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 194 (2016) 755–766.
Davids, D. et al. (2016). Medical Plants in Infectious Disease. Scientific research. ISBN: 978-1-61896-177-8.
Davids, D. (2020). How I walk through the gang streets in Manenberg, South Africa. Special issue on violence in the global South. Politeia journal. https://doi.org/10.25159/0256-8845/6731. ISSN 0256-8845.