ABOUT BOOK

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.