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Introduction
This website has been created to collect and spread information concerning the Program for the Valorisation of the Traditional Medicine in Mali and Senegal (PVMTMS), which started in 2005 and will run for three years.
The main objective of PVMTMS is to support the local healing resources (the Traditional Medicines) helping the local operators (the Traditional Therapists). Its aim is to develop their competences further, to establish a dialogue with other healingsystems (first above all medical doctors, nurses, the administrators of the Conventional Medicine) in order mutually agree which areas are of expertise and which are not (articulation amongst systems).
In addition the Program supports the association dynamics of the Traditional Therapists which contribute to give them the competences needed to take part to technical decisions as well as administrative ones.
The Program is managed by Italian NGO (ACRA, CISV, GRT, ORISS and Terra Nuova). Local institutional partners are the Dipartimento di Medicina Tradizionale del Ministero della Sanità (Traditional Medicines Department of the Ministry of Health) in Mali and the Association pour le Développement de l’Arondissement de Fimela Yungar (ADAF – Yungar) in Senegal.
Other operational partners are the Associazione dei Terapeuti Tradizionali del Bélédougou (Bélédougou Traditional Therapists Association) (ATTB) and the Federazione delle Associazioni dei Terapeuti Tradizionali di Bandiagara ( Federation of the Traditional Therapists Associations of Bandiagara) (FATTB) both in Mali . In Senegal we have Associazione Medici Naturali, Erboristi e Opoterapeuti Tradizionali ( The Traditional Natural Doctors, Herbalists and Opoterapeuti Association) (AMPHOT), and the Comitato Koubanao Django Simakounda (Koubanao Django Simakounda Committee) (KDS) in Casamance.
In Mali another partner is the Centro Regionale Medicina Tradizionale per la V° Regione a Bandiagara (Traditional Medicine Regional Centre for the 5th Region in Bandiagara) (CRMT), funded in 1986 by a Program of Technical Cooperation between Italy and Mali .
On the website you can find information concerning the operators within the Program, the activities that have already been carried out and the ones that are envisaged for the future. In detail, you can also check the status of the various activities (in French language) reading the reports as well as using audio-visual material. In the relative sections you can also find references to researches, information and interventions coming from other contests, which we find they might be of use to further study in depth the themes and the areas of action of the Program. Such areas are:
- The knowledge of traditional remedies, the herbal ones in particular, with their evaluation, production and diffusion.
- The actions carried out to preserve and protect the biodiversities of the local flora which is threatened by extinction.
- Rituals, ceremonies and procedures performed during therapeutic contests.
- The process of professionalisation of the Traditional Therapists and their partnership dynamics.
- Examples of programmes interactions between diverse healing methods, with regards to both specific problems (malaria, epilepsy, mother-infant health, orthopaedics, etc) or more general ones.
A page is dedicated to news related to relevant events in this field such as publication of books, reports, audio and visual material, as well as information concerning conferences, meetings and programmes of interventions.
Finally there is a forum for open discussion about the results and problems for all those interested.
At the present time, the whole site is available both in Italian and French language. Announcements and occasional material could be also summarised in English and Spanish. In case you find problems in consulting the Italian or French version of the site whilst trying to find out more specific aspects of the Program, please contact us at the following address:
Materials
Illicit mixed knowledges
Rosalba Piazza 2006 I saperi illeciti del meticciato. Medicina e tradizioni di cura tra i Maya-K’iché del Guatemala, Edizioni Colibrì-Oriss, Milano (Illicit mixed knowledges: Medicine and healing traditions among the
Maya-K'iche' in Guatemala).
Like all others, the history of medicine results from social dynamics occurring in time and space; like all others, medical knowledge does not spread due to natural processes or osmosis, but rather in the context of power relations - the war and peace of arms and ideas.
This book starts in Totonicapán, a small Maya-K’iche’ indigenous city in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, and with a mapping of health care practices there: university trained physicians, natural healers and, above all, curanderos, practitioners called to serve their communities by virtue of their dono (calling): it is their efforts that permit the continued rebirth and transformation of traditional knowledge. Into this coarse cloth the author weaves a number of different threads: the encounter between premodern European and autochthonous American medical practices and knowledges - a meeting rich with consonances that existing power relations would soon make unreconcilable; the historical creation of scientific medicine with its universalist fruit and its colonial implications; contemporary international health policies, always precariously balanced between the abstract humanism of Rights and the concrete violence of imposition. By superimposing the threads that link different spheres and different eras in the recounting of a lived research experience, there emerges a rethinking of some conceptual certainties that hide – and this is the guiding idea of the book – the seeds of surrender to constituted knowledge/power.
Rosalba Piazza, a historian, has worked in cooperation projects in Guatemala. She is presently studying idolatry cases in Oaxaca (Mexico) during the colonial period. She has also published Adamo, Eva e il serpente. L'idea di sessualità nel pensiero cristiano dalla Patristica a Tommaso d'Aquino (La luna, 1988) and Colonizzazione ed Evangelizzazione (Dehoniane, 1992).
News
THE FIRST COLLABORATIVE MEETING ON PHYTOMEDICINE
Development and Clinical Validation of Medicinal Plants for Rational Pharmacotherapy
Monte Verità, Ascona – Switzerland, 11th –13th May 2007
ETM 2007 - EUROPEAN TRADITIONAL MEDICINE International Congress
VINCI, Italy - October 5-6, 2007
Welcome to Vinci, Leonardo's home town, near Florence, to discuss together about Traditional Medicine of European Countries to search clinical evidence.
Main topics : Herbal Medicine, Naturopathy, European Acupuncture, Homeopathy, Manual Therapies, Bioethics, Efficacy, Safety, Regulation, Clinical Researc.
Genève sur la MEDECINE TRADITIONNELLE AFRICAINE
info@csmtp.ch
4-5-6 Mai 2007 Université de Genève UniMail
Une importante rencontre internationale entre la tradition et la science
www.csmtp.ch
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