Beyond Medical Pluralism: Medicine, Power and Social Legitimacy in India

Sujatha, V.

doi:10.4135/9789353287801.n30

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Health behaviour was shaped and modified by penal codes, by secondary socialisation through medical discourse (Foucault 1980), and by civic experiments in sanitation (Sujatha 2014). Alternative medical traditions were banished or forced underground, and biomedicine emerged as the sole arbiter of the body (Sujatha and Abraham 2012). By the 20 th century, this power of biomedical science through the state was so complete as to seem internalised by the people.…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

I: COVID-19 pandemic and the politics of risk: Perspectives on science, state and society in India

Sujatha

2021

Contributions to Indian Sociology

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Health behaviour of the people is said to be shaped by market forces, scientific or religious institutions or the state. It is pertinent to examine the dominant institutions that shape health cultures in any society, at any given point in time. While public health has not been a priority for the Indian state, the COVID-19 pandemic created an unmistakable opportunity for state regulation. It is the argument of this article that the state has been central to the framing of the COVID-19 pandemic and the identification of relevant interventions, such that the borderline between the political and medical is blurred. The influence of these institutional decisions on the health behaviour of the people indicates that compliant health behaviour is a symbolic resource for the state in societies like India, irrespective of whether the government actually delivers on its health care delivery.

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Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

I: COVID-19 pandemic and the politics of risk: Perspectives on science, state and society in India

Sujatha

2021

Contributions to Indian Sociology

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“…For instance, Gandhi is said to have rejected ayurveda for these reasons 1 1 For more on Gandhi’s views on ayurveda, see Victoria Sheldon’s paper, ‘Vitality, Self-Healing and Ecology: The Flow of Naturopathic Thought Across the United States and India’, in this collection. (Quaiser 2012). The power dynamics between medical systems, budgetary allocations for them in various South Asian nation states and the patterns in the pluralistic health behaviour of the people have evinced enormous anthropological interest and a perusal of major medical anthropology journals in the past four decades will reveal that the study of medical pluralism in South Asia has consistently occupied research attention for some time now (Sujatha 2018).…”

Section: Medicine and Political Patronagementioning

confidence: 99%

Globalisation of South Asian Medicines: Knowledge, Power, Structure and Sustainability

Sujatha

2020

Society and Culture in South Asia

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The discourses on globalisation focus their attention on the flow of capital and technology from the global North. Historical, anthropological and sociological studies, however, point to crucial flows of medical knowledge, health practices, medicinal plants, other genetic resources and the first-hand knowledge of their applications into the global North from other regions rich in biodiversity. These flows do not just continue to happen but have been significant in shaping the postmodern condition. This collection is an attempt to draw attention to the less visible flows by presenting the epistemic, political, social and ecological dimensions of the globalisation of South Asian medicines and the ramifications of this process abroad and at home. The introduction outlines a framework to understand the convergences and divergences in the medical systems and health practices in the South Asian region. Although contemporary trajectories of traditional medicines in South Asian nations are many and varied, they face similar issues and share common anxieties. The challenge will be in evolving effective solutions at many levels and there are several possibilities for mutual learning among the South Asian nations.

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“…While medical practitioners draw on categories of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ as legitimating signs in the ‘cultural politics’ of authenticity and modernity, their therapeutic and public work importantly transforms conventional orientations toward the body and health (Langford 2002). Hence, rather than deconstruct the ‘cultural politics’ of naturopathic discourse surrounding authenticity, this section prioritises an ontological approach as found in Sujatha’s framing of medical pluralism and syncretism (Sujatha 2018: 438): ‘Rather than viewing contemporary Ayurvedic discourses as cultural exclusives, sociological approaches view culture and medical knowledge as deeply connected to the changing social co-ordinates of the subjects of knowledge who are graduating from modern colleges of traditional medicine’. It is important to focus on the plural, contested and often competing conceptions of the body being proposed by practitioners, so to not essentialise all as solely framing discourses and practices as strategic signs of modernist aspirations for national or post-colonial belonging.…”

Section: Profile: Dr Jacob Vadakkancherymentioning

confidence: 99%

Vitality, Self-healing and Ecology: The Flow of Naturopathic Thought Across the United States and India

Sheldon

2020

Society and Culture in South Asia

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For over 5,000 years, the region now known as India has held a rich reservoir of medical systems, each providing distinct orientations towards illness experience, aetiology, cure and prevention. Since the turn of the twentieth century, there has been a considerable rise in the cultural recontextualisation of European and North American medical traditions in South Asia. With a focus on the guiding concepts of vitality, self-healing and ecology, this article maps the transnational trajectories of naturopathy across three sites: its instantiation into the United States’ early 1900s cultural climate of health epidemics and industrialisation; its rearticulation into the context of Gandhian anti-colonial movements in India; and its transformation into a mode of asserting public health and environmental advocacy in contemporary India. After tracing the trajectory of naturopathic thought, this article will provide a practitioner profile of naturopathy Dr Jacob Vadakkanchery as well as a framing of his politicised response to the 2018 floods in Kerala, south India. This particular examination serves as a microcosm of a larger trend: contemporary practitioners in India overtly re-frame naturopathic concepts in relation to immanent environmental and public health concerns.

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Beyond Medical Pluralism: Medicine, Power and Social Legitimacy in India

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

I: COVID-19 pandemic and the politics of risk: Perspectives on science, state and society in India

I: COVID-19 pandemic and the politics of risk: Perspectives on science, state and society in India

Globalisation of South Asian Medicines: Knowledge, Power, Structure and Sustainability

Vitality, Self-healing and Ecology: The Flow of Naturopathic Thought Across the United States and India

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