Registers of Knowledge

Chapter 3 traces the institutionalization of traditional medicine and identifies its origin in the epistemological and ontological settlements forged by colonial policies that separated African therapeutics into herbalism and witchcraft. I take efforts to ban practices intervening in evil (witchcraft) and to simultaneously elevate practices working with plants (herbalism) as critical points in the genealogy of traditional medicine in that they have shaped the development of the forms of expertise, kinds of knowledge, and techniques of governance that define it as a modern category of knowledge and practice. Dawa lishe responds to, unsettles, and reworks this history as it is present through the recently redesigned registration system for healers, their premises, and their medicines. Centering alternative ways of knowing, these social-ecological-therapeutic projects attend to how lands and bodies move through each other. Plant(ing) remedies denaturalize now well-institutionalized answers to the following questions: “What are plants?” and “Who can know them?”