Biomedicalized Globalities : The Institutionalization of ‘Good Science’ in Contemporary Ayurvedic Research

Within the larger set of concerns that explore the politics of knowledge and identity underpinning modern formulations of Ayurveda, my paper will investigate how a ‘modern’ traditional medical system ‘goes global’. Sociological and anthropological interest in the evolution of Global Ayurveda and non-western forms of healing has focused on understanding the “global urge” as a consequence of pharmaceuticalization. My research explores, however, how a context of globality is established within Ayurvedic research itself and how the global is imagined, performed, practiced and produced in communicating the results of medical research in Ayurveda.

Research is one of the key sites in which the notion of the ‘global’ in Ayurveda – the global as an amalgam of the cultural, the classical, the western and the modern - is played out. I will show how this emergent context is played out at the level of the scientific journal and published literature that have become an important means of claiming legitimacy for Ayurveda as a medical system. Specifically germane to this argument will be the ways in which research data in Ayurvedic research reports is presented as being rooted simultaneously in Indian traditions as well as in cutting-edge evidence based science. In noting this tendency, my presentation will discuss how the production of difference is as integral to Global Ayurveda as the production of similarities in order that a ‘pan-humanity’ benefits from it.

Speaker

Ritika Ganguly, PhD Candidate (spv. Jean Langford), University of Minnesota

Organisers

Department of Social Sciences, French Institute of Pondicherry

Venue

Jawaharlal Nehru Conference Hall, French Institute of Pondicherry, 11, Saint Louis Street, Pondicherry – 605001

Time

16h30

See also : Societies and Medicines in South Asia programme page.