14 chapter
results should come quickly. Recall that Ajit described allopathic psychiatric
treatment as having a “sudden eff ect.” Although allopathic treatment does not
attend as much to the quality of the present—that is, the process of therapy—
the speed of allopathic therapy appeals to people who feel they do not have
time to engage in gentler but slower ayurvedic treatment.
Ajit calls our attention to another aspect of the aesthetic and phenom-
enological experience of illness when he describes his problem as a “mental”
(manasika) illness. “Mental” is one of several idioms, including bōdham (“con-
sciousness”) and ōrmma (“consciousness/memory”), which people in Kerala
use to describe their experiences of illness. Th ese idioms, and the modes of
experience they represent, form part of a local phenomenological orientation,
a set of relations between mind, body, consciousness and other parts of the
person through which one mediates one’s experience of the world. I describe
this as a “local” phenomenological orientation because I am suggesting that
these orien tations are culturally and historically constructed. “Local” phe-
nomenologies are, of course, informed by larger discourses and philosophies,
but as opposed to a universal phenomenology, which philosophers have long
attempted to defi ne, people suff ering “mental” distress in south India reveal
that people experience the world through a variety of phenomenologies. People
in various settings make sense of their personhood and their way of being in
the world in terms of a range of modes of experience and perception—mind,
manas, body, ōrmma, soi, dasein, among others—that cannot be reduced to
mind-body dualism or embodiment.
In anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, gender studies and other
fi elds, much attention has been paid to the paradigm of embodiment and to
intriguing critiques of the limitations of Western mind-body dualism. For a
long period, perhaps since the development of modern research universities,
academic enquiry focused almost exclusively on thought and mental repre-
sentation, overlooking how people feel and experience the world viscerally
or through the body. To correct this representationalist bias, researchers over
the last two decades have examined how our embodied experience shapes our
engagement with the world and have questioned what they see as the limita-
tions of mind-body dualism. Ethnographers claimed to have found peoples
who transcend the dichotomies of western mind-body dualism and ground
experience more fi rmly in the body, a discovery that actually continues a long-
term trend in Western academia to fi nd in the East or the cultural Other the
fulfi llment of what is lacking in modernity and the West. Th e search for the
embodied Other, in which research on the body appears to be caught, has led us
to overlook what may be a great diversity of phenomenological experience that
cultures construct diff erently in various settings. Living neither in the realm