In this paper, we chart the context in which contemporary legal debates around
traditional healing in Senegal unfold, pointing in particular to the type of
power–knowledge relations that are at stake in both the current legal status–quo, and
legal changes proposed in 2017. We interrogate the struggles over legitimacy and
recognition that are at play in these processes, and the ways in which different actors
relate to both formal legal rules, and more fluid forms of legalities, in which
imaginaries of the law, and negotiations with the law, translate into everyday practices.
We underline how legal and scientific discourses are mobilised to draw the opportunities
and boundaries offered to different healing agents, and to organise their respective
authority. Traditional healers overlap with modern health practices, while retaining their
own ontologies and claims to legitimacy while representatives of the biomedical
professions insist that they should have some oversight over the regulation of all
healers. As negotiations continue over the possibility for the state to regulate
traditional healing, everyday legal choreographies define the relative roles,
possibilities and precarity of different healing agents.