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4 Experiencing the World from Body to Ātman
In the 1990s, researchers in anthropology and other fi elds became enthralled
with the possibility of transcending mind-body dualism. Th e modern assump-
tion that illness and other experiences are either of the mind or of the body had
become dissatisfying to many. Mind-body dualism was exposed as a Western
construct fi rst articulated in the work of Descartes, and many non-Western
cultures off ered alternative approaches that revealed the intertwining of body
and mind, emotion and cognition and other dualities. Th is chapter complicates
this story, and evokes the particular, localized variety of ways people attend to
sensory and phenomenological experience.
While academic studies of the body do provide an important critique of earl-
ier research that had considered experience in mentalistic and representational
terms and through the assumptions of Western mind-body dualism, there has
developed a tendency to use this analytic corrective to depict non-Western cul-
tures as grounding experience in the body and as lacking a phenomenologic al
orientation that distinguishes mind from body. In other words, the exotic
Other has come to serve as the aesthetic, earthly antidote to a West that was
imagined as overly cerebral and disembodied. “Mental” patients and possessed
people in Kerala reveal a variety of tangible and intangible modes of experi-
ence that include distinctions between mind and body yet portray an orienta-
tion to experience—or a “phenomenology,” as I call such orientations—that
diff ers from Western mind-body dualism. At the outset of this study, I claimed
that phenomenological experience is to some degree locally constructed. Here,