introduction 19
ātman as they encounter adverse life events, struggle with illness and navigate
the variety of therapeutic options that are available in South India.
Aesthetic Experience in Healing
Th e experience of people undergoing treatment for psychopathology in Kerala
affi rms Laderman and Roseman’s position that “if healing is to be eff ective or
successful, the senses must be engaged” (1996: 4), but compels us to expand
upon this insight. Researchers have analyzed the aesthetics of healing but have
not compared the aesthetics of diff erent medical systems or examined the aes-
thetic experience of biomedical treatment.^10 Th us, analyses of the aesthetics of
healing do not explicitly recognize that the sensory engagements they explore
are often agreeable or pleasurable experiences and thus do not fully reveal
the benefi ts of this experience. Put more simply, it has been overlooked that
a therapy that feels good might have some advantages over a therapy that is
more painful or abrasive, especially for problems of mental illness.
Robert Desjarlais (1992) makes an important link between aesthetics
and embodied experience in his analysis of healing in Nepal, explaining that
Sherpa shamans make an ill person feel better through sensory, aesthetic
engagement with the body: “Meme [a shaman] changes how a body feels by
altering what it feels. His cacophony of music, taste, sight, touch, and kines-
thesia activates a patient’s senses. Th is activation has the potential to ‘wake’ a
person, alter the sensory grounds of a spiritless body, and change how a body
feels” (206). Desjarlais’ analysis of Sherpa shamanism alerts us to the visceral
experience of the shamanic healing process, but it would be intriguing to
learn how this experience compares to the visceral experience of a biomed-
ical hospital. Desjarlais explains that there is an allopathic medical facility
available in the area where he did research, but it is a general clinic, not a
psychiatric facility (163). People experiencing “soul loss” who were treated by
a shaman did not visit this clinic for their problems. If allopathic psychiatric
facilities were available, as there are in Kerala, they would likely claim to
heal things like soul loss, which they would call by another name, and would
constitute an alternative therapy.
Conducting research in Kerala, in which the institutionalization of mul-
tiple medical systems makes a diversity of treatment for mental illness widely
available, I could compare the aesthetic experiences of patients in diff erent
therapies, including biomedicine. Th is allows me to bring attention to what
one might call the positive and negative aesthetics of healing to more fully
understand the signifi cance of aesthetic engagements in the healing process.