16 chapter
literature. Th is transition provided a profound corrective to studies that looked
at human experience in cognitive or mentalistic terms and through the
assumptions of Western mind-body dualism. Until the late twentieth century,
researchers and scholars overemphasized the realm of the mind, focusing on
concepts, ideas and representations of human experience while paying little
attention to visceral experience, the world of the senses, or the fact that our
perception is shaped by our condition of being in a body.^4
Th e discovery of the body and embodied experience profoundly aff ects social
and cultural analyses of health and illness. Illness is a powerfully em bodied
experience that was previously approached by medical anthropologists and
other social scientists in terms of peoples’ concepts and beliefs.^5 While dif-
ferent people, or cultures, may have diff erent “understandings” of the body
or “concepts” about healing and the “meaning” of illness, illness and healing
are highly embodied experiences. Th ey are not just conceived: they are felt,
lived, and experienced, aff ecting the person bodily, aesthetically and emotion-
ally as well as mentally and existentially. In examining experiences of illness
and healing in India, I am both embracing and refi ning this turn to the body.
I consider the importance of the aesthetic-experiential realm for comprehend-
ing the process of healing while going beyond the depiction of non- Western
subjects as people who are somehow more in touch with their bodies to depict
a greater variety of aesthetic and phenomenological orientations than we pre-
viously imagined.
While drawing our attention to the body, researchers have created a picture
of the world wherein peoples who are labeled “non-Western” or “traditional”
are either more grounded in their bodies or they experience the world with a
more subtle awareness of mind-body interconnection.^6 Meanwhile we are led
to imagine that the Western subject is naively unaware of the embodied nature
of his own experience (I say “his” intentionally; the Western woman is fre-
quently seen as akin to the non-Western subject in her awareness of her body).
“Mental” patients and spirit-possessed people in Kerala, however, express their
suff ering explicitly in terms of the mind and other intangible parts of the per-
son, which I suggest actually represents a greater degree of rarifi cation away
from the body, or a more fi ne-tuned parsing of the intangible from the mater-
ial, than is contained in Western mind-body phenomenology.
Attempting to discern and map out local phenomenologies, orientations
to experience, which are not simply about the body but about the condition
in which a person lives as a combination of mind, body and other locally con-
strued modes of experience, should provide richer insights into the nature of
human experience than our tendency to look for transcendence of Western
mind-body dualism in the world outside the modern, middle-class West.