The Spirituality of Others and the WHO Discourse on Traditional Medicine

Abstract

Abstract This chapter draws on primary literature published since the early 1970s to reconstruct three distinctive discourses behind the WHO’s interest in ‘traditional medicine’: the hope that it would provide the ‘manpower’ needed to roll out primary healthcare reform in developing countries; the political desire of newly decolonized nations for cultural and economic independence; and the idea that indigenous herbal remedies provided a repository of ‘active ingredients’ that would reduce the cost of medical care. Each rationale produced a distinctive accommodation of the inexplicable, ‘spiritual’ aspects of ‘traditional medicine’. Though the driving forces behind this development are diffuse, this chapter shows that the WHO’s interest in this topic traced a meandering but steady path towards a greater acceptance of non-biomedical healing modalities and alternative epistemologies of healing and caring