Revisiting medical pluralism

Medical pluralism is not a new issue in medical anthropology. Over four decades medical anthropologists have studied and reflected on medical pluralism, emphasizing different perspectives of professionals, patients, users and institutions. They have tried to understand the multiplicity of realities within and across contexts, and have studied the ways in which different therapeutic practices occur side by side, sometimes competing with each other, while also mutually influencing (pre)suppositions, understandings and practices. With growing recognition that plurality figures prominently in peoples’ therapeutic practices across the world, medical pluralism has become a more or less taken-for-granted concept in medical anthropology. Meanwhile, cutting-edge debates in contemporary scholarship have moved on to notions such as “diversity”1 , raising the question if and how these developments could inspire new horizons for the concept medical pluralism (Krause et al. 2012). Talking about medical pluralism today involves – in some way – looking back. Since the notion was first coined in a discussion group around Charles Leslie during the 1970s, medical pluralism was framed as a scientific endeavour with an embedded political agenda that sought to defend the right of non-biomedical healing practices to exist in a world where biomedicine was seen as becoming increasingly dominant. Initial worries that biomedicine might supplant other traditions proved unfounded as evidence mounted that pluralism remained a prominent feature in healing practices around the world. This observed prevalence of medical pluralism in, for instance, investigations of healing practices, stands in contrast with the relative paucity of critical (theoretical) debate about the concept, which has shaped and coloured theorizing.