Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices, such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as "natural" and unproblematic, we sometimes seek to bypass, circumvent, or even transcend the dominant ideologies of our cultures as they are manifested in the institutions of health care. The contributors to this volume describe such contestations and circumventions of health ideologies, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries, on the basis of case studies from India, the South Asian Diaspora, and Europe, focusing on relations between body, mind, and spirit in a variety of situations. The result is not always the "live and let live" medical pluralism that is described in the literature.
Asymmetrical Conversations : Contestations, Circumventions, and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries
Description
Table of Contents
Introduction: Entangled Epistemes
Harish Naraindas, Johannes Quack & William Sax
Chapter 1. Medicines of the Imagination: Cultural Phenomenology, Medical Pluralism and the Persistence of Mind-Body Dualism
Laurence J. Kirmayer
Chapter 2. Porous Dividuals? Complying to a Healing Temple (Balaji) and a Psychiatric Out-patient Department (OPD)
Johannes Quack
Chapter 3. Medical Individualism and the Dividual Person
Francis Zimmermann
Chapter 4. My Vaidya and my Gynecologist: Agency, Authority and Risk in Quest of a Child
Harish Naraindas
Chapter 5. Davaa and Duaa: Negotiating Psychiatry and Ritual Healing of Madness
Helene Basu
Chapter 6. A Healing Practice in Kerala
William Sax and Hari Bhaskar
Chapter 7. Ayurveda in Britain: The Twin Imperatives of Professionalisation and Spiritual Seeking
Maya Warrier
Notes on Contributors
Author Description
William S. Sax has taught at Harvard, Christchurch, Paris, and Heidelberg, where he is Chair of Ethnology at the South Asia Institute. His major works include Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Central Himalayan Pilgrimage (1991), The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia (1995), Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal (2002), God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in the Central Himalayas (2008), and The Problem of Ritual Efficacy (2010).