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ABSTRACT
Many herbal medicine clinics in the West African nation of Ghana employ alternative medicine diagnostic equipment to help them stand out within a competitive popular medical sector. These devices are a prominent feature of clinics that identify as practising scientific herbal medicine, and they promise scientifically advanced methods of diagnosis and treatment that stand outside mainstream biomedicine. Based on ethnographic research at two such clinics, I argue that frustrations with the functionality of these devices reveal the ongoing legacies of colonialism and its aftermath in Ghanaian cultures of expertise. Alternative medicine devices were sometimes represented as objects of spectacle. However, their failure to operate as advertised engendered debates about Ghana’s place in transnational technoscientific networks. Finally, access to alternative medicine devices was structured through morally ambiguous financial transactions. In these ways, the construction of scientific herbal medicine is patterned by cultural meanings of science and technology produced through legacies of Ghana’s twentieth-century history.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the owners, employees, and patients of the herbal medicine clinics that hosted the research that informs this article. This manuscript was improved based on feedback from audiences at Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society, the Stanford Humanities Center, a joint meeting of The University of Chicago's African Studies Workshop with Northwestern University, and the UCSF Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine. Thank you to Niko Besnier, Jennifer Blaylock, Jennifer Cole, Jessica Pouchet, Victoria Stead and anonymous reviewers for their substantive engagement with the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kate R Hampshire and Samuel Asiedu Owusu, ‘Grandfathers, Google, and Dreams: Medical Pluralism, Globalization, and New Healing Encounters in Ghana’, Medical Anthropology 32(3), 2013, pp 247–265; Kate Hampshire et al., ‘The Application of Signalling Theory to Health-Related Trust Problems: The Example of Herbal Clinics in Ghana and Tanzania’, Social Science & Medicine 188, 2017, pp 109–118.
2 These clinics therefore offer insights into ‘postcolonial technoscience’, or assemblages of science and technology that are especially visible when considered from locations that foreground colonialism and its aftermath. See Warwick Anderson, ‘Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience’, Social Studies of Science 32 (5/6), 2002, pp 643–658. Here, I understand postcolonialism to refer to the ongoing ways issues in contemporary politics are framed by colonial histories, even as the specific politics of postcolonialism differ across national contexts.
3 Names of people and businesses have been changed to maintain their anonymity.
4 P Twumasi, Medical Systems in Ghana: A Study in Medical Sociology, revised edition, Tema, Ghana: Ghana Publishing Corporation, 2005; Kofi Appiah-Kubi, Man Cures, God Heals: Religion and Medical Practice among the Akans of Ghana, Totowa, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1981.
5 Jean Marie Allman and John Parker, Tongnaab: The History of a West African God, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
6 Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, ‘Writing Medical Authority: The Rise of Literate Healers in Ghana, 1930–70’, The Journal of African History 57(1), 2016, pp 69–91.
7 Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
8 Ayo Wahlberg, ‘Bio-Politics and the Promotion of Traditional Herbal Medicine in Vietnam’, Health 10(2), 2006, pp 123–147.
9 Stacey Langwick, ‘Partial Publics: The Political Promise of Traditional Medicine in Africa’, Current Anthropology 56(4), 2015, pp 493–514.
10 Ama de-Graft Aikins, ‘Healer Shopping in Africa: New Evidence from Rural-Urban Qualitative Study of Ghanaian Diabetes Experiences’, BMJ (Clinical research ed.) 331, no. 7519, 2005, p 737; Razak Mohammed Gyasi et al., ‘Do Health Beliefs Explain Traditional Medical Therapies Utilisation? Evidence from Ghana’, Cogent Social Sciences 2(1), 2016, pp. 1–14.
11 Hampshire et al., ‘The Application of Signalling Theory to Health-Related Trust Problems’.
12 Hampshire and Owusu, ‘Grandfathers, Google, and Dreams’.
13 Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
14 Austin C Lescarboura, ‘Our Abrams Verdict’, Scientific American, September 1924, p 222.
15 Austin C Lescarboura, ‘Our Abrams Investigation—IV’, Scientific American, January 1924, p 16.
16 See Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American, New York: New York University Press, 2003; James Henry Young, The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967.
17 Radionics ephemera, Bakken Museum archives.
18 Bruce Copen, Radiesthesia, Radionics, Electronic Equipment, Services and Supplies, 1974, documents asociated with 99.14.1-5 Radionic Machines by de le Warr, Bakken Museum rchives.
19 ‘Biocom Device’, radionics ephemera, Bakken Museum archives.
20 David E Nye, American Technological Sublime, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p 3.
21 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
22 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
23 Peter J Bloom et al. (eds), Modernization as Spectacle in Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, p 1.
24 Pauline Kusiak, ‘“Tubab” Technologies and “African” Ways of Knowing: Nationalist Techno-politics in Senegal’, History and Technology 26(3), 2010, pp 225–249.
25 Kusiak, ‘“Tubab” Technologies and “African” Ways of Knowing’, p 236.
26 Jonathan Roberts, ‘Remembering Korle Bu Hospital: Biomedical Heritage and Colonial Nostalgia in the Golden Jubilee Souvenir’, History in Africa 38, 2011, pp 193–226.
27 Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence (1st edn), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp 107–138.
28 Roberts, ‘Remembering Korle Bu Hospital’, p 213.
29 Prakash, Another Reason, p 39.
30 Michael Taussig, ‘Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic’, in In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
31 Jesse Weaver Shipley, Trickster Theatre: The Poetics of Freedom in Urban Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, p 175.
32 Shipley, Trickster Theatre, p 193.
33 Barry F Saunders, CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008; Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
34 Margarete Sandelowski, Devices & Desires: Gender, Technology, and American Nursing, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, p 113.
35 Allman and Parker, Tongnaab.
36 Currency conversions are approximate for fieldwork in 2013.
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Damien Droney
Damien Droney is a visiting assistant professor in medical anthropology at Oberlin College in the United States. His work considers the politics of health science and technology, especially in Ghana. He is currently completing a book manuscript that examines the professionalization of herbal medicine practice.