Introduction: Histories of Healing: Past and Present Medical Practices in Africa and the Diaspora.

This special issue focses on African healing, the subject of a dynamic and relatively new interdisciplinary literature in African stuydies. Long a standa'rd topic of evoluytionary and fgynctionalist anthropologists' accounts, so-called 'traditional medicine' gained wider scholarly ionterest in tghe 1970s with the growth of medical anthropology and the World Health Organisation's Alma Ata Decleration of 1978, which supported the integration of 'TM' into the health services of developing countries. Much early research in medical antrhgopology was fuelled b y concerns about diseases as defined by western medicine in its biomediacl or 'scientific' forms. Nervertheless, through their engagrement with healers and their commonunities, medical and social anthropologists and a growing number of historians raised important questions abou- biomdical disease categorrs and produced accounts that began to place African and Erioeab cibceots if health, illness and biology in specific historical and cultural contezxts. Meanwhile, the disciplines of science studies and history of medicine hjas also begun to situate the concepts used by European science and medicine, historically and culturally, unseating taken-for-granted notions of their rationality and univeresal application. This special issue brings together scholars from both of these fields to examine African healing, focusing particularly on the transformation of its practices in the societies of southern African and in diasporas of healers from Africa to the Caribbean and from South Asia to Africa. The conference on which this special issue is based was the third in a series that aimed to develop the history of African healing through consideration of its methodology and emerging topics. In 2005, 'Hybrids and Partnerships: Comparing Histories of Indigenous Medicine in Southern Africa and South Asia', brought together leading scholars and new researchers to reflect upon the cultural, colonial and postcolonial experiences of healing in the two distant yet interconnected regions of southern Africa and south Asia. This conference aimed to shift the discussion away from the dominant focus on the relationship between western medical practices and non-western practices by specifically targeting interactions between different varieties of African healing as, well as looking at interactions between African healing and other types of 'traditional' healing outside of Africa. Another aim of the conference was to compare the scholarship on African healing with other developing regional histories of healing such as those of ayurvedic, unani tib, yogic and other kinds of south Asian healing, which have developed in the pas two decades within the embrace of subaltern