Main description:

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.

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