عنوان

Scientists, Healers and Bioprospectors:

TLpq2468330713

انگلیسی

Scientists, Healers and Bioprospectors:

[Thesis]

Hill, Rachael Anita

The Epistemological Politics of Traditional Medicine in Ethiopia, 1930-1998

Roberts, Richard

Stanford University

2019

341

Ph.D.

Stanford University

2019

This dissertation examines local efforts to study, develop and regulate traditional medicine in Ethiopia from 1940-1998. This period (1940-1998) marks the formation of traditional medicine as an object of scientific inquiry and a legal creation-a category of knowledge defined and regulated by the state. The author argues that in Ethiopia, therapeutic pluralism is a longstanding feature of the therapeutic landscape and not simply a consequence of the introduction of biomedicine. Legislative and scientific initiatives that coalesced around traditional medicine were often in tension with the pluralistic and complex intellectual history of Ethiopian therapeutic practice. Public health officials and scientists who sought to codify, categorize and distinguish between "good" and "bad" therapeutic practice were part of a larger effort to shape Ethiopia into a "modern" nation-state. Ethiopian medicinal plant researchers were also part of a global story about the growing scientific interest in medicinal plants on the part of bioprospectors and conservationists. The author combines the use of oral interviews and ethnographic observation with an analysis of archival material in Amharic to situate Ethiopia in both its local and global contexts and understand why traditional medicine became a national priority when it did.

African history

North African studies

Roberts, Richard

Hill, Rachael Anita

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y