Regulating the boundaries of medicine: traditional healing and the law in contemporary Senegal, Professor Emilie Cloatre, Kent Law School
ABSTRACT: In this presentation, I will explore the relationship between law and healing practices at the edge of medicine, focusing on the specific issue of the regulation of traditional healing in Senegal. Traditional healing has generated long-standing challenges for states around the world. Although a vast proportion of patients worldwide rely on traditional healing for their everyday care, how to organise and regulate its practice raises numerous practical and symbolic difficulties. Rather than simply highlighting the complexity of regulating a particular kind of socio-cultural practice, these difficulties also raise broader questions about healthcare regulation, the regulation (and definition) of medicine itself, and the interface between legal and biomedical institutions. Ongoing debates around the regulation of traditional healing in Senegal illustrate some of these issues and points of friction.
Traditional healing is not currently regulated by Senegalese law as a specific area of practice. Instead, it is subject to indirect regulation, emanating from laws relevant to biomedicine, and from other cultural and professional norms. In the first part of the paper, I will review how a range of normative expectations and institutional arrangements currently define the boundaries of traditional healing, and its ambivalent positioning in the shadow of biomedicine. In the second part, I will turn to the controversies surrounding an attempt by the state to create a law on traditional healing, and redefine traditional healing as a field of practice that could be envisaged as a standalone regulated domain. Through the discussion of both the current ordering of traditional healing, and the controversies that its proposed reinvention triggered, the paper will interrogate the challenges of regulating practices at the edge of medicine and their implications for socio-legal imaginaries.