Traditional Healing and Law in Contemporary Senegal: Legitimacies, Normativities and Practices
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221122434 |
| Author | Emilie Cloatre,Tidiane Ndoye,Dioumel Badji,Adams Diedhiou |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Traditional Healing and Law
in Contemporary Senegal:
Legitimacies, Normativities
and Practices
Emilie Cloatre
University of Kent, UK
Tidiane Ndoye
Université Check Anta Diop, Senegal
Dioumel Badji
Cabinet SISTEM, Senegal
Adams Diedhiou
Université Check Anta Diop, Senegal
Abstract
In this paper, we chart the context in which contemporary legal debates around trad-
itional healing in Senegal unfold, pointing in particular to the type of power–knowledge
relations that are at stake in both the current legal status–quo, and legal changes pro-
posed in 2017. We interrogate the struggles over legitimacy and recognition that are
at play in these processes, and the ways in which different actors relate to both formal
legal rules, and more fluid forms of legalities, in which imaginaries of the law, and nego-
tiations with the law, translate into everyday practices. We underline how legal and sci-
entific discourses are mobilised to draw the opportunities and boundaries offered to
different healing agents, and to organise their respective authority. Traditional healers
overlap with modern health practices, while retaining their own ontologies and claims
to legitimacy while representatives of the biomedical professions insist that they should
have some oversight over the regulation of all healers. As negotiations continue over the
possibility for the state to regulate traditional healing, everyday legal choreographies
define the relative roles, possibilities and precarity of different healing agents.
Corresponding author:
Emilie Cloatre, Professor of Law, Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK.
Email: e.cloatre@kent.ac.uk
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2023, Vol. 32(3) 356–377
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221122434
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Introduction
In November 2017, a legislative proposal on traditional medicine was brought to the
Senegalese Parliament. Soon after, the Ordre des Médecins (General Medical Council)
and other health professionals expressed their opposition in the strongest terms. The
draft legislation became the focus of a legal, and epistemological, controversy that is
still ongoing: the text has not yet been adopted, and it is not clear whether it will. But
it continues to animate conversations among doctors and traditional healers alike, fuelling
tensions that have been ongoing for several decades, and hinge on the questions of
whether traditional healing should be regulated by the state, and if so, how healing tech-
niques and healers deemed legitimate can be separated from those considered problem-
atic. Maybe more importantly, this debate brings to light tensions around the tacit
arrangements currently in place, in the absence of formal regulation.
The 2017 debate reflects the uncertainty that characterises the interface between law
and traditional healing around the world. If the WHO has increasingly embraced the
idea that traditional healing should be regulated by states, such embedding of traditional
healing in the mechanisms and logics of legal regulation raises numerous theoretical and
practical questions (Tilley, 2021). At stake are fundamental issues about the interface
between science and other forms of knowing and healing, and about the role of different
groups and institutions in overseeing therapeutic care. In Senegal as elsewhere, these
questions unfold in a postcolonial context that has affected both legal systems, and
medical institutions (Snyder, 1981; Tousignant, 2012, 2013). Debates also rest on par-
ticular configurations, including the ambivalence of the current legal status of traditional
healers, and local institutional dynamics, notably with regards to the role and political
standing of the Ordre des Médecins. If the Ordre is a privileged interlocutor of the
state in the regulation of medicine, and potentially other public health matters, its
primary role is that of a professional association, tasked with maintaining ethical and pro-
fessional standards in medical practice, including through disciplinary action. The central
role currently played by the Ordre in relation to the regulation of traditional healing, and
contestations around its future, illustrate the interface between institutional and epistemic
legitimacy in the regulation of healing, and the ambivalent position of traditional healing
vis-à-vis biomedicine . Currently, the Ordre des Médecins’s de facto role in regulating the
practices of healers who rely on a different type of ontology, partly born out from a
history of legal uncertainty, raises broader questions about the institutional relationship
between law and science. Biomedical knowledge and its institutional authority are mobi-
lised in our case study to fill some of the gaps and uncertainties fostered by the absence, to
date, of legislation on traditional healing, leaving it instead subject to laws written for,
and about, biomedicine. Recent efforts by the state to intervene more directly, erecting
traditional healing as its own regulatory matter, expose the difficulties of moving away
from long-standing epistemic and institutional configurations. But until these efforts
materialise, legal influences over traditional healing take multiple shapes. Law is trans-
lated, interpreted, stretched to territories where it may not technically belong, and coexists
with a set of other norms and expectations from which it can be difficult to disentangle.
In this paper, we chart the context in which contemporary legal debates around trad-
itional healing in Senegal unfold, pointing in particular to the type of power-knowledge
Cloatre et al. 357
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