South African roots towards global knowledge: music or molecules?

Abstract

This study highlights current global health biopolitics in conjunction with politics of indigeneity. The illustration is achieved by looking at the politics of knowledge at play in the pre-clinical trial of a traditional medicine in Cape Town, South Africa. The instance reunites healers and scientists in a common project to test the efficacy of a local wild shrub through the process of a randomised controlled trial, the current golden scientific standard to determine truth about the efficacy of medicines. How traditional forms of knowledge translate, or not, into this process is the first point I develop with relation to the trial. Inevitable reassessments of efficacy awakened in this process open a debate between representational learning of standardized scientific knowledge, and learning through embodied forms of knowledge in negotiations of how best to heal with medicines. I argue that the dynamics of these politics of knowledge within the trial lead on the one hand towards an optimal management of life at the molecular level, and on the other hand towards broader relational politics of life anchored in sounds and embodied forms of knowledge.