Traditional Medicine Goes Global

Pan-African Precedents, Cultural Decolonization, and Cold War Rights/Properties

Bibliographic Data

ID3924661
AuthorsHelen Tilley (0000-0002-9524-546X, Interactive Research and Development, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume36
Pages132-159
Publication date2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueOsiris (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0369-7827 • E-ISSN: 1933-8287
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/714329
OpenAlexW3178584574
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited20

The concept of traditional medicine, for all its multifaceted roots, achieved global prominence only during the Cold War era in the wake of massive decolonization. While developments within Asia contributed to this shift, it was often leaders and diplomats from newly independent African countries who first put different aspects of traditional medicine forward for debate within United Nations agencies. The Organization of African Unity (OAU), along with several other pan-African initiatives, paved the way for this work, tying the continent’s cultural heritage to its medical heritage and pushing for its “cultural property” to be protected as intellectual property. These goals were both precedent setting and inherently fraught: they gave states more tacit power to act as gatekeepers for those labeled “traditional healers” (who often referred to themselves by different terms entirely and had ambivalent relationships to state authorities). Diplomats also promoted an ethos that endogenous experts’ “know-how” was a public good and the preserve of governments, rather than private capital. This article reconstructs a central strand in the story of how traditional medicine went global, paying special attention to pan-African networks’ radical foreign policy agendas. These ultimately ensured that global institutions, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), opened their doors to polyglot therapeutics (or different conceptual schemas to define health and illness) and promoted the idea that heterodox healers were integral to people’s rights to health. Though pan-African initiatives were unable to overturn deeply entrenched power imbalances or enact their full agenda, they did have lasting legal, policy, and epistemic effects that continue to reverberate around the world to this day

Ethos · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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