Authors:
Pedro Crepaldi Carlessi
Vitor Henrique Pinto Ido
Islândia Maria Carvalho de Sousa
Abstract:
Since the 1970s, the World Health Organization (WHO) has advanced “traditional medicine” as a global policy category for culturally grounded health care. In South America, this framework has encountered a distinct political landscape in which traditional peoples have emerged as collective subjects mobilizing around rights, territorial claims, and expanding conceptions of citizenship. This paper examines how the codification of “tradition” from an identity category into a health regulatory term reconfigures the conditions under which difference can be expressed, claimed, and sustained. Drawing on archival research across 10 South American countries, as well as WHO and United Nations documentation, the study traces how the global framework has been incorporated, requalified, or displaced across distinct national contexts. The analysis reveals a spectrum of regulatory arrangements in which institutional incorporation and the political force of collective difference are not commensurate, ranging from frameworks that engage with the political projects through which traditional peoples have sought to reshape citizenship to those in which “tradition” operates as a market authorization criterion detached from the subjects who sustain it. The codification of tradition into governable categories does not simply extend recognition to those who bear it; it reconfigures the terms under which they can act as political subjects.
