Local health traditions have largely been devalued in the biomedical understanding of health and disease. This approach fails to recognise that a population can be ‘self-reliant’ in its health care practices, a philosophy, and perspective that is held within non-Western health cultures such as the ancient tradition of Ayurveda (Mathpati et al., 2020). Among the unintended yet damaging consequences of Cartesian divides (traditional medicine/biomedicine, science/people), the overuse of drugs such as antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) have become critical matters of public/global health agendas. The coronavirus pandemic demonstrates that biomedical disease control alone is insufficient when considering the overall health and wellbeing of a population. For example, in the absence of appropriate (health)care, dietary changes along with supplements from various medical traditions have not only emerged as effective cures and remedies for healing from (long) Covid; they have also become biopolitical tools to self-manage vulnerabilities and inequalities (i.e.healthcare, employment, and childcare in convalescence).
This open panel invites scholars to engage with local, traditional, and profane healing knowledge-practices as an alternative, collective, and sustainable health care approaches as well as biopolitical tools of individual responsibility. By focusing on how to build on and establish ‘good relations’ between (1) local and traditional medicines and biomedicine and (2) lay and professional expertise, this panel addresses pluralistic ways of healing practices and methods in unequal and uncertain worlds.
Themes might include but are not limited to:
-Status of knowledges (local, traditional, profane)
-Traditional and complementary medicine in pandemic
-Non-western knowledge practices around the body and healing
-Self-body-world and biopolitics
-Neopagan rituals, women, and magic
-Citizen science and eHealth activism initiatives
-Health inequalities and ‘reverse’ innovation