This is a closed event. Registration is not possible.
The cross-disciplinary workshop focuses on the plurality of healing practices paying particular atten-tion to dormant networks and modes of translating healing knowledges across (g)localities, as well as shedding light on the existing power relations between knowledge, society, and the law from both a contemporary and a historical perspective. Fostering the dialogue across disciplines, it brings together medical anthropologists, historians of medicine, and socio-legal scholars, traditional healers and physicians with the aim of exploring how remedies exist, persist and thrive in the periphery of contemporary health systems and ‘Western’ medical standardisation.
It seeks to integrate different perspectives of (historical) actors from different parts of the world – namely West Africa, South Asia, East Asia, the Southwest Indian Ocean, Pacific islands, Eurasia and the Caribbean – whose voices and role in the history of healing tend to be orientalised, marginalised, misinterpreted, re-appropriated, capitalised or discarded because it is not measurable through technical indicators and standards. By the same token we hope to examine the discursive engagement of traditional medicine with biomedicine and the way the people navigate between different healthcare universes, and develop new avenues to rethink the collective value of healing traditions and their (silent) histories and the tensions arising out of post-colonial and neo-colonial contexts and orientations.
Overall, this exploratory workshop seeks to foster transdisciplinary dis/orderings; stage an encounter and a space to play and think about persistence of healing knowledges and its peoples, their environment, and beliefs; and explore the meaning of healing traditions across transnational boundaries and broken temporalities.
