Nomad RSI - Therapeutic diversity and the environment

Edited by Laurent Pordié (2007), Indian Anthropologist, 207p.
Language: English.

• Download the table of content (PDF format)

The anthropology of health practices situated at the margins of state control is a relatively neglected areas of the discipline in India. Social scientists do not give them the same attention as scholarly medical traditions. Usually located in villages, those locally named “folk healers” are, however, regularly frequented by the general population. This situation contrasts again very strongly with the national health policies that accord no or very little attention to these therapists (would that be to control, support or simply to censure them). This special issue of the Indian Anthropologist is intended as a contribution to the study of such therapeutic practices. A series of articles of an essentially ethnographic nature explores their implication in the process of Indian modernity. Three themes bind the articles together: the social role of the healers and the social functions of healing processes, the presence of the religious and its normative dimension on the practice of medicine, and the importance of healing in group identity.