Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
Asian Medicine
Medicine and the Cultural Politics of National Belongings in Contemporary India Medical Plurality or Ayurvedic Hegemony?2018 •
This paper explores how nationalism in India is articulated through references to Ayurveda as opposed to institutionalized nonbiomedical pluralism in the form of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy). It grapples with a tension between purportedly equal support for all AYUSH systems and privileged support for Ayurveda, situating this discrepancy within two competing ideologies of the nation: the ideology of inclusive secularism anchored in Nehruvian ideals of India's accommodativeness and unity in diversity, and the ideology of Hindu nationalism which promotes a distinctive image of India as a country with glorious but culturally monolithic past. Is Ayurveda the only 'Indian' medicine, or are all AYUSH traditions 'Indian' too? If Ayurveda can be promoted as national tradition, can Unani be also 'national?' By tracing these tropes in the narratives of AYUSH practitioners and public discourses circulated in media, this paper demonstrates the hegemony of Ayurveda within nonbiomedical plurality, and thus argues that state legitimation is not a sufficient factor to prevent from hierarchies and disparities across pluralistic medical landscape.
Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness
Doctors of Plural Medicine, Knowledge Transmission, and Family Space in India2019 •
The transmission of traditional medical knowledge – either institutionally or through established lineages – is assumed to involve one single tradition or another. In India however, families of doctors often engage with multiple traditions, including Ayurveda, Unani, homeopathy, yoga, and biomedicine. Parents, children, siblings and spouses trained in different medical systems occasionally share knowledge and clinical space, producing versatile therapies. By exploring such cases, I challenge studies focused on single traditions and propose to examine “family space” as the physical and relational proximity that enables kin doctors to experiment with plural therapies while negotiating legitimacy and authority within the changing institution of the Indian family.
The Indian Economic & Social History Review
In-Disciplining Jwarasur: The Folk/Classical Divide and Transmateriality of Fevers in Colonial Bengal2013 •
Extant scholarship on Jwarasur [the Fever-Demon] sees him as a colonial-era invention tied to the exigencies of colonial rule. Jwarasur is held to belong exclusively to the domain of Bengali ‘folk medicine’ rather than ‘classical Ayurveda’. We challenge both these contentions and draw four inter-related inferences. First, we posit that Jwarasur was not alien to classical Ayurvedic medicine. Second, we claim that Jwarasur was significant to the way Ayurvedic physicians negotiated fever. Third, we trace the invention of the folk/classical divide under colonial modernity. Finally, we posit that the divide inspired new reading strategies through which modernising Ayurvedists sought to expunge the transmateriality of Jwarasur. Jwarasur, we find, was constantly re-embedded into multiple heterogeneous traditions of medical and religio-moral practice. These diverse embeddings actively militate against the existence of any corpuscular ‘systems’ called ‘folk’ or ‘classical’ medicine. Rather Jwarasur is a common figure that networks a number of heterogeneous, amorphous domains. The extant disciplinary protocols of History, Anthropology, etc., however, are blind to this networked past and hence keep alive the colonial distinctions of ‘folk’ and ‘classical’. Our critical history contrapuntally, seeks to restore the promiscuity of these corpuscular fields and historicise the divisions that distinguish them.
Historians of indigenous medicine in colonial India have looked more closely at the changes, reinventions and reformulations of institutions of Ayurveda and Unani than at the cognitive content of the drugs themselves. The few historians who have examined the changing content of indigenous medicines have conceptualised the creation of materia medica of Indian drugs through two tropes: one of circulation (of specific drugs) through epistemological and geographic boundaries and the second, of marginalisation of certain other drugs either through a lack of textual legitimacy or the lack of the newly discovered ‘active principles’ within each drug. While these approaches have been useful, there is a case to be made for understanding the creation of formularies of Indian drugs in 19th and 20th centuries through the prism of medical praxis in India.
As a Muslim-majority region, Bengal is conspicuous by its absence from histories of the institutionalisation of Islamic medicine in South Asia. Bengal's invisibility in these histories is partly a result of exclusive scholarly pre-occupations with Unani Tibb and, to a much lesser extent, Tibb ul Nabi. ‘Islamic medicine’ in Bengal was institutionalised under other names and drew upon other traditions. This article explores the institutionalisation of three such traditions of ‘Islamic Medicine’ and argues that the form they took drew directly upon the distinctive history of Islam in Bengal.
India and China face the same challenge of having too few trained psychiatric personnel to manage eff ectively the substantial burden of mental illness within their population. At the same time, both countries have many practitioners of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine who are a potential resource for delivery of mental health care. In our paper, part of The Lancet and Lancet Psychiatry's Series about the China–India Mental Health Alliance, we describe and compare types of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine in India and China. Further, we provide a systematic overview of evidence assessing the eff ectiveness of these alternative approaches for mental illness and discuss challenges in research. We suggest how practitioners of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine and mental health professionals might forge collaborative relationships to provide more accessible, aff ordable, and acceptable mental health care in India and China. A substantial proportion of individuals with mental illness use traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine, either exclusively or with biomedicine, for reasons ranging from faith and cultural congruence to accessibility, cost, and belief that these approaches are safe. Systematic reviews of the eff ectiveness of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine fi nd several approaches to be promising for treatment of mental illness, but most clinical trials included in these systematic reviews have methodological limitations. Contemporary methods to establish effi cacy and safety—typically through randomised controlled trials—need to be complemented by other means. The community of practice built on collaborative relationships between practitioners of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine and providers of mental health care holds promise in bridging the treatment gap in mental health care in India and China.
Amsterdam University Press
Unani Medicine in the Making. Practices and Representations in 21st-Century India.2020 •
Unani Medicine in the Making examines the institutions and practices of Unani medicine, the Graeco-Islamic healing practice based on the humoral theory attributed to Hippocrates and officially recognized as a system of medicine in India. Drawing on diverse materials, including Urdu sources, interviews with practitioners, and observations in clinics, the book explores what Unani medicine is today by attending to its multiplicity, scrutinizing apparent tensions between the understanding of Unani as a system of medicine and its multiple enactments as Islamic medicine, medical science, or alternative medicine. Ethnographic details provide vivid descriptions of the current practice of Unani in India, and invite readers to rethink the idea that humoral medicine is incommensurable with modern medicine and science, and that the modernization of Asian medicines invariably leads to their biomedicalization. Ultimately, the book also discusses the relationship of Unani with Muslim communities, examining the growing practice of Prophetic Medicine in Urban India and increasing representations of Unani as Islamic Medicine.
Transmutations: Rejuvenation, Longevity, and Immortality Practices in South and Inner Asia
Transmutations: Rejuvenation, Longevity, and Immortality Practices in South and Inner Asia2017 •
https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/hssa/index.php/hssa/issue/view/6 History of Science in South Asia, Vol 5 No 2 (2017): Special Issue Guest editors: Dagmar Wujastyk, Suzanne Newcombe, and Christèle Barois Wild and diverse outcomes are associated with transmutational practices: the prolongation of life, the recovery of youth, the cure of diseases, invincibility, immortality, enlightenment, liberation from the cycle of rebirths, and unending bliss. This range of outcomes is linked to specific practices taught in separate traditions and lineages in medical, alchemical, yogic and tantric milieus across South and Inner Asia. These practices can be individual or collective, esoteric or secular, and occur in different places from hospital to village to monastery; they involve transmutations of substances as well as transmutations of the body. Every expression by a particular lineage has a distinguishing articulation. Yet there are also very clear commonalities and interconnections between the traditions’ aims, methods and expected results. In this special issue of HSSA, we examine transmutational practices and their underlying concepts in this wider context of South and Inner Asian culture. How do these practices and ideas connect and cross-fertilise? And conversely, how are they delineated and distinct? Table of Contents: Editorial Transmutations: Rejuvenation, Longevity, and Immortality Practices in South and Inner Asia Dagmar Wujastyk, Suzanne Newcombe, Christèle Barois i-xvii Articles Acts of Improvement Dagmar Wujastyk 1-36 Stretching Out Life, Maintaining the Body Christèle Barois 37-65 On the Meaning of Rasāyana in Classical Yoga and Āyurveda Philipp Maas 66-84 Yogis, Ayurveda, and Kayakalpa (link is external) Suzanne Newcombe 85-120 Mastering Deathlessness Ilona Barbara Kędzia 121-142 Tibetan Bonpo Mendrup Anna Sehnalova 143-180 Reflections on Rasāyana, Bcud Len and Related Practices in Nyingma (Rnying Ma) Tantric Ritual Cathy Cantwell 181-203 Tibetan Precious Pills as Therapeutics and Rejuvenating Longevity Tonics Barbara Gerke 204-233 The Flame and the Breeze Projit Bihari Mukharji 234-264
Asian Medicines: Encounters, Translations and Transformations Asian medicines are engaged in complex global networks of actors: conservators who watch the changing supplies of wild plants in Asian mountains, medical botanists who study the substitution practices of collectors and marketers in Asia, policy makers who control or prevent the entry of drugs into European countries, corporations who seek to exploit drugs based on Asian medical knowledge, professional associations who seek to regulate Asian medical practice. ICTAMs VII and VIII both took place in Asia (2009 in Bhutan, 2013 in Korea). The European location of ICTAM IX will allow us to take stock of the current state of Asian medicine and to examine the global flows of medical knowledge, practice and materials from a different but equally significant vantage point. Traditional Asian medicines play a significant role in improving the wellbeing of people worldwide, both as a health care system in their own right, and as a resource for bio-discovery projects. Their applications will only grow, and to reach a full understanding of traditional Asian medicine, it is crucial to integrate professionals from many disciplines, including medical anthropologists, traditional medicine practitioners, clinical trial specialists, ethnobotanists, ethnopharmacologists, ethnopharmacognosists, ethnochemists, herbalists, businessmen, historians, economists, political scientists, conservationists, botanists, translators and more. ICTAM IX will bring together these professionals to share their experience, findings and knowledge, and work out appropriate strategies and networking to enhance research on traditional medicines.
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
Swapnaushadhi: The Embedded Logic of Dreams and Medical Innovation in Bengal2014 •
NMML Occasional Paper
In Search of Indigenous Medicine: Medical Pluralism and the Ayurvedic Movement in Colonial India2020 •
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
The Ayurveda of Baba Ramdev: Biomoral Consumerism, National Duty and the Biopolitics of ‘Homegrown’ Medicine in India2017 •
Historia Hospitalium 28 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013), pp. 45-74.
From Hospitals to Hospital Medicine: Epistemological Transformation of Medical Knowledge in India2020 •
Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology
Medical Pluralism among the Tharus of Nepal: Legitimacy, Hierarchy and State Policy2009 •
Craig, Sienna R., Barbara Gerke, and Victoria Sheldon. 2019. "Sowa Rigpa Humanitarianism: Local Logics of Care within a Global Politics of Compassion." Medical Anthropology Quarterly. doi:10.1111/maq.12561.
Sowa Rigpa Humanitarianism: Local Logics of Care within a Global Politics of CompassionIndian Journal of History of Science
Indigenous and Western Medicines in Colonial South India: Nature of Discourses and Impact.pdf2018 •
Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques
Preserving Identity or Promoting Safety? The Issue of Mercury in Siddha Medicine: A Brake on the Crossing of Frontiers2015 •
2009 •
The Journal of Asian Studies
Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana: Retro-botanizing, Embedded Traditions, and Multiple Historicities of Plants in Colonial Bengal, 1890–19402014 •
Social History of Medicine
Beyond East and West. From the History of Colonial Medicine to a Social History of Medicine(s) in South Asia2007 •
Medicine Anthropology Theory | An open-access journal in the anthropology of health, illness, and medicine
The recognition of Sowa Rigpa in India : How Tibetan medicine became an Indian medical system2008 •
Andrew Goss (ed)., Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire (2021)
Science and its Publics in British IndiaGerke, Barbara. 2019. "Potency of Tradition: Turquoise, Coral, and Pearl in Sowa Rigpa " Himalaya, special issue on Potent Substances, edited by Barbara Gerke and Jan van der Valk 39 (1):91-110.
Potency of Tradition: Turquoise, Coral, and Pearl in Sowa Rigpa2005 •