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Health and medicine have so far not constituted a significant area of study within the social sciences in India. Given that the experience of disease and its detection are deeply embedded in social settings, foundational questions on the meaning and understanding of health and the role of medicine need to be raised.
How do we distinguish between health and ill-health? How do we differentiate between a medical problem and a lifestyle issue? Does the medical ...
Medical Pluralism in Contemporary India questions the dominant view of indigenous systems of medicine as cultural remnants of a traditional past. It points out that their practitioners greatly outnumber those of biomedicine (allopathy) and explores the reasons behind the enduring presence and importance of health care traditions such as ayurveda, siddha and unani.
The authors go beyond simplistic distinctions like traditional-modern and science-culture. They draw ...
Folk medical knowledge is a well-explored topic in the anthropology of India; in this book, however, it has not been viewed as an appendage to folk religion, or as the exotic system of one village, nor as a diluted version of the ancient medical classics as in the ‘folk-classical’ dichotomy. The dialectics of the autonomy and interdependence of medical lore in the network of indigenous medical knowledges is the crux of the book. Based on field data from Tamil ...