Indian Medical Traditions Between State and Village
AbstractApart from an introduction to the eight essays that make up this special issue of Asian Medicine this opening piece discusses India’s hierarchical medical landscape and the politics of value involved. Inspired by recent scholarship, I argue on the one hand that state-sanctioned medicine—formal biomedicine and formal Indian medicine—and, on the other hand, subaltern medicine practiced by informal practitioners—both folk and biomedical—typify the Indian medical landscape. Forms of Indian medicine are not bounded by themselves. Their demarcation is a political act. These politics of signification beg to be deconstructed when we want policies concerning Indian medicine to be realistic and successful. After all, the assumption of this introduction and the special issue as a whole is that Indian medicine deserves a place next to biomedicine.