Worlding Traditional Medicine: A Case from Thailand

Abstract

In my research project on "worlding medicine" I follow the genesis, enactment, and circulation of scientific facts in the field of traditional medicine in Thailand. Therefore, I set out for the multiple trajectories and mundane practices of diverse actors. STS scholars focus on how biomedical technologies and standards travel globally. Feminist and postcolonial STS scholars argue, that these often circulate along the route of globalization understood as universalizing western knowledge, neoliberalism, neo-colonialism and humanitarian reason structured by epistemic and physical violence. Drawing on fieldwork in Thailand, I argue that in contrast to mainstream medical discourses the making of scientific facts in traditional medicine is more than a simple translation of traditional knowledge into biomedical facts. I introduce worlding as a way of ethnographic theorizing in order to open an alternative perspective that contrasts this hegemonic understanding of globalizing health as unidirectional distribution of technological and political health standards. It allows to enter into dialog with actors about their world-making practices, how they unequally live and share their bodies, infrastructures, technologies, and (scientific) evidences in order to understand the global entanglements of traditional medicine. In my talk I show how actors in the field of traditional medicine in Thailand enact a medicine that diffracts the taxonomies of the seemingly separate worlds of hard bioscience and traditional belief systems in their scientific world-making practices. Mapping these diffractions enables me to tell a story about the making of scientific facts and worlds that crisscross global space and to decentre the geopolitics of biomedical knowledge.