Article ID: CBB380173840

Traditional Medicine Goes Global: Pan-African Precedents, Cultural Decolonization, and Cold War Rights/Properties (2021)

unapi

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.

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Authors & Contributors
Bashford, Alison
Carter, Jimmy
Cook, Harold John
Cruickshank, Paul Joseph
Cueto, Marcos
DiMoia, John P.
Journals
Cold War History
Social History of Medicine
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
History and Technology
Publishers
Harvard University
University of Pennsylvania
Johns Hopkins University Press
MIT Press
NUS Press
Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Concepts
Cold War
Colonialism
Decolonization
International relations
Medicine and politics
Public health
People
Foege, William H.
Salk, Jonas Edward
McNamara, Robert Strange
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, late
19th century
21st century
Places
Africa
United States
France
India
Soviet Union
Tunisia
Institutions
World Health Organization (WHO)
United Nations
Rockefeller Foundation
Centers for Disease Control (U.S.)
UNESCO
United States. Central Intelligence Agency
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