Nomad RSI - Therapeutic diversity and the environment

Pondicherry, 19-20 April 2004 - International Seminar - Healing Systems in India: Politics and Practices

Co-organised by the French Institute of Pondicherry, the Foundation for the Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT), Bangalore, and supported by Nomad RSI

Presentation

Indian medicines are a matter of concern for a variety of actors ranging from practitioners and users, to social scientists, activists and governmental planners. Each of them have specific views on, and positioning in, the health system and play a certain role in its configuration and dynamics. Indian medical plurality is thus closely interlinked in the social field, an examination of which would prove expedient for the understanding of medicines today. Each of the following themes will be discussed:

• The commoditization of scholarly medicines: Indian medicines are characterized by an increasing urbanization and an expanding market for “traditional” health care. These contemporary trends apprise of the constitution of spaces of socio-medical vulnerability and inform on the social, epistemological and practical transformation of medicine. This further informs on the production and ideologies of modernity, and the way the latter are transcribed into medical practice and expressed through medicines.
• Issues pertaining to the legality of medical practice: Deeply embedded in social and identity fields, the legal recognition of a given medicine is today an imperative to reach social and medical institutional legitimacy. It does, however, exist a number of tolerated practices which both nurtures and derive from the classical (legal) medicines. This panel will explore the social challenges, the national strategies and the normative implications of making a medicine legal.
• The social role of the healers: Beside their medical activities, such individuals detain non-medical role in their community due to their status of healer or, say, birth attendant. Then, what is the social dimension and practice of a healer in today’s India when his or her practice has been supplanted by the emergence of biomedicine? How do the practitioners negotiate their position within a dominated medical system? And how this can be indicative, or not, of a need to revitalize healing practices when these are eroded?

This seminar, conceptually designed in a reflexive anthropological fashion, puts all actors at the center of the question, each of them being both subject and object. It will enable of an encounter between selected anthropologists, sociologists, researchers belonging to medical traditions and policy-makers so as to facilitate cross-fertilization and reciprocal understanding. It will finally examine, through the structure of the workshop itself and the themes developed therein, the social construction of medicine. The abolition of inter- (and intra-) disciplinary boundaries is part of the heuristic approach of this workshop.

• Download the seminar poster (PDF)

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Participants

 Banerjee Madhulika (University of Delhi)
 Blaikie, Calum (NRU)
 Dekhang, Tsering Dorjee (Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute, Dharamsala):
 Deliège, Robert (Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)
 Dhabai, Bhanwar (Jagran JanVikas Samiti, Udaipur)
 Gurmet, Padma (Amchi Medicine Research Unit - CCRAS, Ladakh)
 Hancart Petitet, Pascale (Université d’Aix-Marseille / NRU)
 Kalam M.A. (Madras University)
 Prasad, Purendra (University of Hyderabad)
 Pordié, Laurent (French Institute of Pondicherry / NRU)
 Ramani, Vaidya (Gandeepam Research Hospital)
 Shankar, Darshan (Foundation for the Revitalization of Local Health Traditions)
 Sujatha V. (Goa University)
 Taradatt, Shri (Dpt of AYUSH, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Delhi)
 Tirunarayanan, Vaidya (Centre for Traditional Medicine & Research, Madras)

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Programme

Day 1

Day 2

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