Description
Interweaving theory with narrative, Langford explores the strategies of contemporary practitioners who reconfigure Ayurvedic knowledge through institutions and technologies such as hospitals, anatomy labs, clinical trials, and sonograms. She shows how practitioners appropriate, transform, or circumvent the knowledge practices implicit in these institutions and technologies, destabilizing such categories as medicine, culture, science, symptom, and self, even as they deploy them in clinical practice. Ultimately, this study points to the future of Ayurveda in a transnational era as a remedy not only for the wounds of colonialism but also for an imagined cultural emptiness at the heart of global modernity.
An ethnography of Ayurvedic medicine which argues the ills it cures are largely effects of postcolonial identity.
About the Author
Jean M. Langford is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
Reviews
"This rich study incorporates a wide range of contemporary and historical materials to make wonderful theoretical interventions into the literature on Ayurveda and India. Langford pulls the reader into a new understanding of the nuanced relationships between history, nation, modernity, clinical debate, and the practices of Ayurveda."-Vincanne Adams, author of Doctors for Democracy: Health Professionals in the Nepal Revolution
Book Information
ISBN 9780822329480
Author Jean M. Langford
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 653g