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.
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Naraindas, Quack, and Sax edit this volume interrogating ideologies of health and the ways that they come to be regarded as automatic and natural, yet are periodically resisted by alternative practices. Contributions discuss mind-body medicine in the West, divisible or porous selves in Indian culture, the rationalism within what appears to Westerners to be spiritual language and the humoral system of Ayurveda, and a case study of a woman straddling two different epistemologies of health in trying to avoid a hospital birth. Medical pluralism, syncretism, and conversation between traditions are assessed, and the experimental and heterogeneous results of the encounter between spiritualized Ayurveda and biomedicine in Britain are explored, where one might have expected professionalization and homogenization. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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