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

In this chapter, I explore the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine, inorder to reflect on how particular temporalities shape, and are shaped by, theinterface between law and medicine. This chapter makes two key points: first, itargues 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 developingboth crude, and more subtle, social patterns of power, dominance, and exclusionthat continue to impact on contemporary societies. Second, it argues that as lawincreasingly engages in the regulation of other types of medicine, it continues toemulate biomedical models and assumptions as to what 'modern medicine'should look like, including its temporal features. This chapter is written as I amstarting a large investigation of the multiple ways in which traditional andalternative medicines apprehend and are apprehended by law in several states inEurope and Africa.2 Although the project has several aims, my interest in the fieldcame, 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 medicineas institutions were involved in this ambivalence. It is useful, to 'set the scene' ofthis chapter, to return to this briefly