Chapter 6 Traditional medicines, law and the (dis)ordering of temporalities

In this chapter, I explore the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine, in order to reflect on how particular temporalities shape, and are shaped by, the interface between law and medicine. This chapter makes two key points: first, it argues that both biomedicine and law have relied on a particular sense of ‘modernity’ as a linear temporal process; in turn, this has been key in developing both crude, and more subtle, social patterns of power, dominance, and exclusion that continue to impact on contemporary societies. Second, it argues that as law increasingly engages in the regulation of other types of medicine, it continues to emulate biomedical models and assumptions as to what ‘modern medicine’ should look like, including its temporal features. This chapter is written as I am starting a large investigation of the multiple ways in which traditional and alternative medicines apprehend and are apprehended by law in several states in Europe and Africa.2 Although the project has several aims, my interest in the field came, in part, from the ambivalent and complex ways in which the idea of ‘modernity’ seemed to be shaping the field and, in turn, how law and medicine as institutions were involved in this ambivalence. It is useful, to ‘set the scene’ of this chapter, to return to this briefly

Law and ANT (and its Kin): Possibilities, Challenges, and Ways Forward

This paper interrogates the contributions that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has made, and can continue to make, to the critical study of law. Both within its original field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and beyond, ANT has enabled a reimagining of the ‘social’ as relational, heterogeneous and fluid. In turn, it has argued for a renewed attention to materiality in social analysis. For law, such approach is potentially fruitful, significant, and disruptive of a number of assumptions of previous (socio-)legal scholarship. In this paper, I sketch out key elements (and critiques) of ANT, previous efforts to bring ANT into law, and discuss its potential for enhancing understandings of law. At the same time, I argue that ANT in law is best approached with a commitment to care, and to kinship, and in conversation with feminist thinkers, legal ethnographies and the discrete voices of law

Traditional medicines, law, and the (dis)ordering of temporalities

In this chapter, I explore the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine, in order to reflect on how particular temporalities shape, and are shaped by, the interface between law and medicine. This chapter makes two key points: first, it argues that both biomedicine and law have relied on a particular sense of ‘modernity’ as a linear temporal process; in turn, this has been key in developing both crude, and more subtle, social patterns of power, dominance, and exclusion that continue to impact on contemporary societies. Second, it argues that as law increasingly engages in the regulation of other types of medicine, it continues to emulate biomedical models and assumptions as to what ‘modern medicine’ should look like, including its temporal features

The regulation of acupuncture in France and the UK: Shifts and fragmentation in contrasting healthcare systems

This article explores the regulation of acupuncture in the UK and France. It focuses on the dilemmas such regulation has raised, and the effects of two contrasting approaches to the regulatory organisation of acupuncture within healthcare systems on practices and care. Although the question of how acupuncture, like other complementary, alternative or traditional therapies, should be regulated has often been reduced to a question of scientific knowledge, it is also dependent on the intricacies of national health system governance, state rationales and professional identities. France and the UK provide exemplary instances of contrasting systems, in which each of these factors has come to shape the regulation of the highly heterodox practice that is acupuncture. Overall, exploring the challenges of regulating acupuncture provides useful perspectives on how the make-up of legitimate therapies is constituted in particular healthcare contexts

Law and biomedicine and the making of ‘genuine’ traditional medicines in global health

This paper explores the joint roles of law and biomedicine in constituting the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate (and genuine and ‘pseudo’) traditional healing. It argues that, as law and biomedicine have grown to share common understandings of the nature of knowledge, they have come to act as converging colonizing forces that displace and alter ‘other’ forms of knowing and ordering. Even as regulatory systems set out to recognize some forms of traditional medicine, they continue to operate on assumptions that disqualify knowledge, products, and actors, that do not resemble their biomedical counterparts. This leaves traditional healing systems potentially having to either operate outside the law or adapt to it by transforming themselves, potentially beyond the point of recognition, to fit better into the systems provided by law and biomedicine. The paper explores the series of dilemma this creates for those seeking to ‘regulate better’ traditional medicine

Actor-network Theory and the Empirical Critique of Environmental Law: Unpacking the Bioprospecting Debates

In recent years, actor-network theory (ANT), and the work of Bruno Latour in particular, have gained significant interest amongst legal scholars. This approach, derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and bearing various links with anthropology and ethnographic methods, has enabled new insights to emerge in relation to the ways in which law operates in everyday practices. The innovative position the approach suggests has been largely based on the breaking down of the dichotomy between nature and society, humans and non-humans, and in turn on an emphasis on the importance of materiality in social practices (and its complexity). In his early work, Bruno Latour therefore laid out the foundations of what was to become a radical rethink of sociological assumptions, by challenging the extent to which humanity can ever be imagined as being fundamentally separate from nature. Consequently, he argued that some of the most fundamental assumptions of modernity, about how knowledge is made, societies are built, and humans can relate to their environment, are mistaken and in need of revisiting. Given its deep engagement with our relationship with nature, and its grounding in the sociology of science, it is somehow surprising that ANT has not been more frequently explored in environmental law – in spite of a few examples. However, more resources are available to those wanting to imagine what an ‘ANT approach to environmental law’ may look like, if engaging with STS and the anthropology of science literature that has in recent years aimed to unpack some of the legal stories that surround environmental practices. In this chapter, I seek to bring together some of this scholarship to reflect on what ANT can bring to environmental law research. The chapter is illustrated specifically with the example of the use of natural resources for industrial purposes, and the long-standing debates on ‘biopiracy’ that have animated much legal debate since the 1990s. Through this example, I retrace the difficulty for modern environmental law to engage with practices that challenge the boundaries between nature and humanity, and the dichotomies on which law has so far operated. I explore how studies that have embraced some of the more radical claims of ANT and STS, and engaged ethnographic analyses of social practices, have illustrated how law often fails to seize the messiness of the entanglement of nature and society. I conclude by discussing how ANT, and the work of Bruno Latour, can be used more broadly by environmental lawyers seeking to reimagine the ways in which law relates to nature

Actor-network theory and socio-legal objects: analysing TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in the Republic of Djibouti

This research analyses the role and action of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreements (TRIPS) and pharmaceutical patents in the public health network of Djibouti, by using an approach largely inspired by actor-network theory (ANT). In doing so, it addresses issues that run beyond the specificities of this case study and relate more broadly to the relevance of ANT to socio-legal analysis. The relation between TRIPS, pharmaceutical patents and public health in developing countries has been a widely debated issue in the past decade. However, the field remains limited by a relative uniformity in the range of approaches and case studies chosen in existing research. This project aims to address some of these limits, by looking at the role of TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in a small country with no local pharmaceutical industry, no pre-existing official system of intellectual property, and with a largely undocumented public health system. Using ANT in this project allowed for the complexity of the mechanisms of both TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents to be highlighted. It participated in emphasising that they need to be understood as made of multiple, co-existing dimensions. By demonstrating how specific connections and associations have shaped what TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents are and do in the networks of Djibouti, this research emphasises the artificiality of the dichotomy between social and legal, and proposes an understanding of social connections as symmetrical and co-dependent. It discusses the more general relevance of this approach to socio-legal research. The example of Djibouti also allows for new questions to be raised in relation to the actual impact of TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in “developing countries”. In particular, it emphasises the need to return to a more balanced approach to the relation between pharmaceutical patents and health in poor countries

Regulating Alternative Healing in France, and the Problem of ‘Non-Medicine’

This article explores the ambiguities of the legal system that, in France, regulates ‘alternative healing’, and determines the boundaries of legitimate medical care. While the law suggests that the delivery of therapeutic care should be the monopoly of biomedically-trained professionals, alternative healers operate very widely, and very openly, in France. They practice, however, on the verge of (il)legality, often organising their activities, individually and collectively, so as to limit the likelihood of state intervention. This creates a high degree of precarity for both practitioners and, crucially, for patients. Efforts to change the system are being deployed, but while healers themselves have increasingly organised to seek recognition by the state, alternative healing occupies an uncertain policy space: they are not fully constituted as a social and policy matter by the state, and occupy a liminal position between medicine and spirituality that “unsettles” republican ideals of scientific rationality, and of secularism. This article explores some of those tensions, at the crossroad between law, science, and medicine. It reflects on why tensions seem to persist around the regulatory questions at stake, and suggests that ways forward may depend on moving away from science as a sole arbiter in drawing boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate care in regulation

Chapter 7 ‘Indefensible and Irresponsible'

Drawing on a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this handbook explores theoretical and empirical perspectives that address the articulation of law in society, and the social character of the rule of law. The vast field of socio-legal studies provides multiple lenses through which law can be considered. Rather than seeking to define the field of socio-legal studies, this book takes up the experiences of researchers within the field. First-hand accounts of socio-legal research projects allow the reader to engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches within this fluid interdisciplinary area. The book provides a rich resource for those interested in deepening their understanding of the variety of theories and methods available when law is studied in its broadest social context, as well as setting those within the history of the socio-legal movement. The chapters consider multiple disciplinary lenses – including feminism, anthropology and sociology – as well as a variety of methodologies, including: narrative, visual and spatial, psychological, economic and epidemiological approaches. Moreover, these are applied in a range of substantive contexts such as online hate speech, environmental law, biotechnology, research in post-conflict situations, race and LGBT+ lawyers. The handbook brings together younger contributors and some of the best-known names in the socio-legal field. It offers a fresh perspective on the past, present and future of sociolegal studies that will appeal to students and scholars with relevant interests in a range of subjects, including law, sociology and politics

Actor-network theory and socio-legal objects: analysing TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in the Republic of Djibouti

This research analyses the role and action of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreements (TRIPS) and pharmaceutical patents in the public health network of Djibouti, by using an approach largely inspired by actor-network theory (ANT). In doing so, it addresses issues that run beyond the specificities of this case study and relate more broadly to the relevance of ANT to socio-legal analysis. The relation between TRIPS, pharmaceutical patents and public health in developing countries has been a widely debated issue in the past decade. However, the field remains limited by a relative uniformity in the range of approaches and case studies chosen in existing research. This project aims to address some of these limits, by looking at the role of TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in a small country with no local pharmaceutical industry, no pre-existing official system of intellectual property, and with a largely undocumented public health system. Using ANT in this project allowed for the complexity of the mechanisms of both TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents to be highlighted. It participated in emphasising that they need to be understood as made of multiple, co-existing dimensions. By demonstrating how specific connections and associations have shaped what TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents are and do in the networks of Djibouti, this research emphasises the artificiality of the dichotomy between social and legal, and proposes an understanding of social connections as symmetrical and co-dependent. It discusses the more general relevance of this approach to socio-legal research. The example of Djibouti also allows for new questions to be raised in relation to the actual impact of TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in “developing countries”. In particular, it emphasises the need to return to a more balanced approach to the relation between pharmaceutical patents and health in poor countries