Traditional Medicine Goes Global | Helen Tilley

This is a recording of the lecture given by Prof. Helen Tilley (Northwestern University) on 14 June 2022 entitled Traditional Medicine Goes Global: Pan-African Precedents, Cultural Decolonisation, and Cold War Rights/Properties.

Abstract: The concept of traditional medicine, for all its multifaceted roots, achieved global prominence only during the Cold War era in the wake of massive decolonisation. 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 Organisation 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 Organisation (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.

Helen Tilley is Associate Professor of History and Law at Northwestern University.

Her research examines medical, environmental, and human sciences in colonial and post-colonial Africa, including their synergies with legal, economic, and global history. She is the author of Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Her current project focuses on the history of African decolonisation, global governance, and the ethno-scientific projects that accompanied state building in the colonial and Cold War era. She is investigating, in particular, the different scientific studies and legal interventions in the twentieth century that originally helped to construct 'traditional medicine' as a viable category of research and policy-making.