Worlding Medicine - Negotiating Knowledge Regimes and Practices between Alternative and Biomedicine

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Iris Dzudzek
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392750976

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

Based on the example of traditional medicine in Thailand, this research project investigates how medical knowledge emerges in translocal relations under the auspices of global change. In three case studies, the project explored how traditional medicine is (1) translated into the context of biomedical hegemony and thereby (re-)constituted, (2) how it is made mobile and circulates globally, and (3) which new medical forms and spaces it produces in the course of its translation into new contexts. The ethnographic perspective of worlding enabled to empirically trace the globally circulating regimes of knowledge and practice, and the topologies of power associated with them, that shape the renaissance and reinvention of traditional medicine in Thailand. These are characterized by the simultaneity of global, national, and local influences. They affect traditional herbal medicine and traditional massage in different ways. a) In the field of traditional herbal medicine, the expansion of free trade and intellectual property rights since the 1990s has made it possible to patent the production methods of traditional medicines. This threat to traditional heritage has been answered by laws protecting traditional Thai medicine as well as Thai plant varieties. This resulted in recording and classifying traditional medical knowledge that often had not been scientifically documented before. To ensure the safety of traditional medicine, it was biomedically standardized. This was the prerequisite for the emergence of a market for traditional medicines as it exists today in Thailand. In this process, medicines and the spaces of their production changed radically. b) In the name of its protection, traditional Thai massage underwent standardization as part of the development of a nationally recognized canon called "Traditional Thai Medicine" (TTM). This allowed structured training, degrees and certification, and allowed the global circulation of this healing art. The renaissance of traditional medicine, which was in decline until the 1990s, under the auspices of global and national law thus signifies its rebirth in a new form. But a central insight of this project is also that this worlding of traditional medicine in a transnational space, intersects familiar taxonomies of biomedicine as well as dominant narratives of globalization (diffraction). Thus, this project provides new insights into the powerful topologies of scientific and technical knowledge production at the margins of globalization, and thereby new impulses for power-sensitive science and technology studies as well as for a relational geography of health.

Publications

• "Diffractions of Traditional Herbal Medicines in Thailand – Reading for Greater Difference in the Diverse Economies Debate". Manuskript eines Vortrags auf der "Fifth Global Conference on Economic Geography" am 24.07.2018 and der Universität Köln
  Dzudzek, Iris
  
• "Worlding Traditional Medicine – A Case from Thailand". Manuskript eines Vortrags auf der virtuellen Jahrestagung "Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and Agency of STS in Emerging Worlds", der Society for Social Studies of Science am 18.08.2020 an der Universität Prag, Tschechien
  Dzudzek, Iris
  
• Die Logik des Ausbruchs. sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, 8(3), 165-182.
  Füller, Henning & Dzudzek, Iris
  
• Geographien der Gesundheit. In Geographie: Physische Geographie und Humangeographie, Hrsg. Hans Gebhardt, Rüdiger Glaser, Ulrich Radtke, Paul Reuber, und Andreas Vött, 3. Auflage, 1033–1044. Lehrbuch. Berlin, Germany: Springer Spektrum.
  Dzudzek, Iris, Jonathan Everts, Henning Füller & Judith Miggelbrink
  
• Urbane Gesundheitsgerechtigkeit. Geographische Zeitschrift, 108(4), 249.
  Dzudzek, Iris & Strüver, Anke
  
• Feministische Geographien der Technowissenschaften. Handbuch Feministische Geographien, 190-214. Verlag Barbara Budrich.
  Militz, Elisabeth; Dzudzek, Iris & Schurr, Carolin
  
• Health in the postpandemic city: Contested spatializations and biopolitical implications. Erdkunde, 76(3), 185-197.
  Dzudzek, Iris & Füller, Henning
  
• Verkörperungen. Mehr-als-menschliche Geographien. Schlüsselkonzepte, Beziehungen und Methodiken, 109-130. Franz Steiner Verlag.
  Dzudzek, Iris & Strüver, Anke
  
• Wenn die Verhältnisse unter die Haut gehen. sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, 10(1).
  Bůžek, Richard; Dzudzek, Iris; Hübl, Susanne & Kamphaus, Lisa