Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine

Hybrids and Partnerships:
Comparing the Histories of Indigenous Medicine in Southern Africa and South Asia

15th-16th September 2005  A Conference to be held jointly by Wellcome Units for the History of Medicine, Universities of Oxford and Manchester At the Osler McGovern Centre, 13 Norham Gardens, Oxford.

Cross-fertilisation of knowledge and practice between southern and eastern Africa and South Asia has for centuries linked the geographic, economic and cultural region around the Indian Ocean. Bringing together new researchers and established scholars, this conference will explore the dynamics of this association through the medium of medicine. We will examine historical interactions among healers and bodies of healing knowledge in Africa and South Asia to achieve a greater understanding of situations in which medicines blend, practices hybridise and practitioners form partnerships across diversity and division. We will also examine cases where the reverse happens, where boundaries are affirmed or created, leading to plural and/or hierarchical systems marked by rivalry and the dominance or suppression of healers and healing knowledge.

The historical links between Africa and Asia have long been recognized. From antiquity this has included the spread of humoural medicine from the Mediterranean to South Asia and eastern and southern Africa. The long-term evolution of Swahili medicine as an Asian/African hybrid; the Tantric and alchemical traditions of India, which had interacted with Tibetan traditions; the spread of Portuguese Catholic ideas about the body and healing from the coasts to the hinterlands of southern Africa and South Asia and the diaspora of African ngoma healing in the Old and New Worlds are the result of similar migrations. Today, significant exchanges take place between Africa and South Asia in the realm of pharmaceutical development, production and marketing, as well as in the education and migration of practitioners, in both biomedicine and indigenous medicine. Concerning more recent trends, we must also pay attention to nationalism, development plans and national health care programmes, which have often determined the nature of patronage for particular traditions, as well as the essentialisation of some traditions as 'alternatives'.

The conference will focus on the ways that local knowledge travels, both geographically and epistemologically. We will attempt to uncover the globalising aspects of indigenous medical systems and their ability to absorb and transform other healing traditions, other sciences, other practitioners and other bodies of expertise, even those of Western science and medicine. This will usefully displace biomedicine from its centrality in our accounts, encouraging a shift of perspective towards histories that put other forms of healing practice centre stage. We hope this will lead to ways of telling history through dramas of illness and recovery, disease and death that are meaningful in other cultures and societies.

The conference will focus attention on types of indigenous medicine and on geographical areas previously underrepresented in the literature on medicine and healing, while not neglecting lesser-known partnerships and hybrids between so-called modern and traditional forms of Asian, African and Western healing. This is the third in a series of ground-breaking conferences on indigenous healing to be held in Oxford. The Wellcome Trust has played a pivotal role in promoting studies of Western and indigenous medicine and their interactions in Africa and South Asia. Previous conferences sponsored by the Trust and the Journal of Southern African Studies have helped to develop this emerging field of research.

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Themes:

Formal and informal economies, trends in development and democratisation and their effects on the emergence of new forms of indigenous healing and their relationships with other forms of healing

Humoural medicine, Swahili medicine, Portuguese Catholic medicine - early influences on indigenous forms of medicine in Africa and Asia

Healing and 'locality': globalisation of indigenous healing expertise vs localisation of 'global' forms of scientific, alternative and 'exotic' medicine

Alternative forms of history, healers' histories, African and Asian patients' narratives

Making and unmaking medical territories and boundaries

South Asian and African Medical Diasporas

Medical Pluralisms

Issues of Gender and Childbirth

Ritual, Religion, Medicine and Sorcery: Blurred Boundaries, Deadly Rivalries

Urban/ Rural Practice

Music and Medicine

Colonialism and Independence

The Evolving Nature of Indigenous Medicine

Patents and Prescriptions, Rands and Rupees

Healing and Hybrid Identities: National, International and Personal

Healers and Markets: Informal and Formal, Local, National and International

Alternative Medical Tourism

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Email: belinda.michaelides@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk

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