Constructions of Traditional Medicine during Decolonization and the Global Cold War

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This research explores indigenous knowledge and medical practice in Africa during decolonization, which began in the 1960s. One methodology to be used is to characterize African medical knowledge through the voices of African scientists, politicians, leaders, institutions, and the umbrella organizations such as the World Health Organization. The goal is to explain the ways in which traditional African medicine shifted from the relative periphery to the center of international health concerns during the twentieth century. Such shifts were also taking place in China and India; yet had it not been for the simultaneous efforts within dozens of newly independent African countries, Chinese and Indian leaders might have been lobbying in support of traditional medicine at the international level in isolation. The results of this research are to be published as a book. In addition to the book, the researcher will organize a multidisciplinary conference on traditional medicine and knowledge that will be published as a special issue of a journal. She also plans to develop a website relating historical research on these subjects, and to forge closer ties with a small number of policy think-tanks to provide deeper historical analysis to their policy recommendations. Technical Summary This project will serve to advance scholarly understanding of three interrelated research areas that have begun to receive more sustained attention in the history of science: decolonization and its effects on state-sanctioned research, the role of scientists in defining and codifying traditional medicine, and the role of international institutions and the law in shaping and adjudicating global debates about the boundaries of valid and acceptable knowledge. The project will advance these three areas by bringing to bear findings from several fields that intersect with science and technology studies including African and world history, development studies, environmental history, medical and cultural anthropology, and legal and post-colonial studies. The researcher will systematically explore the legal, disciplinary, political, and economic trends during the course of the twentieth century that constructed traditional medicine as a viable category of scientific research and policy-making. The resulting book will explain the dramatic ascendency of traditional medicine within global and pan-African institutions by situating it in the wider context of decolonization, the rise of ethno-scientific research, and the global Cold War.