IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB633462246

Properties of (Dis)Possession: Therapeutic Plants, Intellectual Property, and Questions of Justice in Tanzania (2021)

Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 36
Pages: 284-305
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/714263

DOI: 10.1086/714263

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Medicine and politics Medicine and law Postcolonialism Medicine, traditional Colonialism Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment Intellectual property Tanzania (Tanganyika, Zanzibar)

Late colonial efforts to articulate witchcraft and herbalism intervened in the precolonial categories of practice through which East Africans differentiated healing (uganga) and harming (uchawi). Taking these interventions as critical points in the genealogy of traditional medicine in Tanzania enables an account of how and why plants have become central to contemporary debates over indigenous knowledge. Developing, promoting, and protecting traditional medicine today requires articulating the properties of plants elucidated by science with the properties of ownership prescribed by modern law. This essay traces the practices of knowing and unknowing that forged traditional medicine in Tanzania and their role in constituting the terms, objects, and institutions through which struggles for justice have been imagined. I argue that the dynamism of traditional medicine as a modern category of knowledge and practice lay in its ability to solve (first colonial and then postcolonial) problems of knowledge and politics simultaneously. Twenty-first-century Tanzanian scientists, healers, herbal producers, policy makers, and patients grapple with these colonial legacies. Yet, traditional medicine has never fully captured the wide range of practices that strive to catalyze growth, fullness, maturation, extension, strength, and fertility. Healing remains unruly, and the friction this creates holds open the possibility of generating alternative forms of the therapeutic value of plants and rendering visible the ongoing forms of (dis)possession that shape notions of justice in late liberalism.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB633462246

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Projit Bihari Mukharji; (2021)
Subaltern Surgeries: Colonial Law and the Regulation of Traditional Medicines in the British Raj and Beyond (/p/isis/citation/CBB460348742/)

Article Laurence Monnais; (2021)
The Reinvention of an Appropriate Tradition or the Colonial Birth of Vietnamese Medicine (/p/isis/citation/CBB115572466/)

Article Helen Tilley; (2021)
Traditional Medicine Goes Global: Pan-African Precedents, Cultural Decolonization, and Cold War Rights/Properties (/p/isis/citation/CBB380173840/)

Article Morgan J. Robinson; (2023)
When a Wonder Is Not a Wonder: Swahili, Translation, and the Communication of Knowledge (/p/isis/citation/CBB737008309/)

Book Joshua Grace; (2021)
African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development (/p/isis/citation/CBB668478842/)

Thesis Malloy, Patrick Thomas; (2003)
“Holding [Tanganyika] by the Sindano”: Networks of Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562261/)

Article Merson, John; (2000)
Bio-Prospecting or Bio-Piracy: Intellectual Property Rights and Biodiversity in a Colonial and Postcolonial Context (/p/isis/citation/CBB000671227/)

Article Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove; (2008)
Bioprospecting and Resistance: Transforming Poisoned Arrows into Strophantin Pills in Colonial Gold Coast, 1885--1922 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000930666/)

Article Leslie de Vries; (2015)
The Dangers of ‘Warming and Replenishing’ (wenbu 溫補) during the Ming to Qing Epistemic Transition (/p/isis/citation/CBB984611462/)

Book Burnett, Kristin; (2010)
Taking Medicine: Women's Healing Work and Colonial Contact in Southern Alberta, 1880--1930 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001200675/)

Book Trais Pearson; (2020)
Sovereign Necropolis: The Politics of Death in Semi-Colonial Siam (/p/isis/citation/CBB099369294/)

Thesis Pearson, Quentin A., III; (2014)
Bodies Politic: Civil Law & Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era Bangkok (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567615/)

Article Park, Yunjae; (2006)
Medical Policies toward Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Korea and India (/p/isis/citation/CBB000660196/)

Article Sara de Wit; (2021)
Gender and climate change as new development tropes of vulnerability for the Global South: essentializing gender discourses in Maasailand, Tanzania (/p/isis/citation/CBB498425445/)

Article P. Wenzel Geissler; Ann H. Kelly; (December 2016)
Field station as stage: Re-enacting scientific work and life in Amani, Tanzania (/p/isis/citation/CBB848138248/)

Article Feierman, Steven; (2000)
Explanation and Uncertainy in the Medical World of Ghaambo (/p/isis/citation/CBB000110023/)

Article Marsland, Rebecca; (2007)
The Modern Traditional Healer: Locating “Hybridity” in Modern Traditional Medicine, Southern Tanzania (/p/isis/citation/CBB001031042/)

Article Mario Biagioli; Alain Pottage; (2021)
Patenting Personalized Medicine: Molecules, Information, and the Body (/p/isis/citation/CBB302669888/)

Article Laura G. Pedraza-Fariña; (2021)
The Intellectual Property Turn in Global Health: From a Property to a Human Rights View of Health (/p/isis/citation/CBB886158125/)

Article Frampton, Sally; (2011)
Patents, Priority Disputes and the Value of Credit: Towards a History (and Pre-History) of Intellectual Property in Medicine (/p/isis/citation/CBB001230164/)