36 chapter
of curing are thus examined along with idioms patients use to describe what
is accomplished in healing that diverge from English-language, allopathically
informed concepts of “health” and “cure.”
Th e discussion moves from Chapter 5 to Chapter 6 by explaining that
while many informants are attracted by how ayurvedic therapy feels, many
use allopathy because it provides quick results. Ajit reveals himself as a fan of
ayurveda, a believer in its high ideals, yet he confesses that many people choose
allopathy because of the time and work pressure that he sees as symptomatic
of contemporary, functional orientations to health: “If I have a fever, I must
get better [literally: must get changed—māranam]. For what? To go to work
the next day. [.. .] Th is is the level at which we maintain our health.” Indeed,
allopathy often provides quick eff ects so that the patient can return to work,
school or the many other obligations people have, although some in Kerala
claim this constitutes a temporary repair rather than an enduring transform-
ation of health. Chapter 6 (“Conclusion: Pleasure, Health and Speed”) thus
explores relations between time, work and aesthetics, suggesting that people in
Kerala are caught in a dilemma between time pressure and pleasure while also
revisiting views of health as absence of illness, the presence of well-being and
the possibility of constant improvement.
Notes
- “Allopathy” will be the term most often used to refer to the medical system that
is also known as “biomedicine,” “Western medicine,” “cosmopolitan medicine,”
or “modern medicine.” As “allopathy” is a popular term for this medical practice
in Kerala, it is appropriate for discussing this ethnographic context. In addition,
“allopathy” best describes how biomedicine is characterized in India and in this
study. Th e term refers to the treatment of illness by opposites, for example, by
using toxic substances that will kill a disease pathogen. Th is method can involve
attacking an illness and employing abrasive techniques. Finally, “biomedicine” is
somewhat misleading in the context of this study since ayurvedic medicine is also
based on an understanding of biology, one that both overlaps with and departs
from biomedical views of biology. - Translated from Malayalam, although words in quotations occurred in English
in the original. In other writings, I have used the diacritical markings from
the American Library Association-Library of Congress Romanization Tables:
Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts for transliterating Malayalam
terms. Although technically precise and useful from the point of view of an
expert in Malayalam linguistics, I have noticed that more reviewers of my writ-
ing have been confused by this system than have been helped by it. In this
study I use a more informal rendering of Malayalam into Roman characters
that excludes diacritical marks other than the line that indicates long vowels
(e.g., ō in bōdham, ā in ātman) and an ś that indicates a particular light “sh”