Faults and Flaws: Therapeutic practices against the norm in South Asia

Objectives

Recourse to traditional methods of treatment is a fundamental characteristic of the health environment in South Asia. We observe in this region the coexistence and the entanglement of legally recognised medicines, popular therapeutic practices and healing rituals. Initially, research focused upon the normative systems to which the different therapeutic “associations” (or cliques, sects, organizations, “families”, “professional bodies”) adhere to, and the processes of legitimization that mould them. Whilst retaining this focus, recent complementary research is giving more attention to practices outside the norm.

The central concern of this International Symposium is to examine the social and medical legitimacy of therapeutic practices with a negative approach, that is, by looking into cases where rules are breached, where values and codes of conduct are disrespected or transformed. Thinking about the faults and flaws in therapeutic practices opens up a vast field of enquiry concerning the relationship between lies and truth, between mistakes and accuracy, faults and merits, fraud and authenticity, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, legality and illegality. The participants are invited to reflect upon the systems of norms and values, whether institutional or not, which define order and proscribe disorder. This approach will allow especially for an exploration of the normative dimensions of science and religion in present day therapies, and of the moral aspects of the medical systems. The overall objective is to better understand the reasons behind the transgression of established norms and the medico-social implications of such transgressions.

This symposium will address the question of relations between practitioners and their patients, of the diagnostic and the etiological systems, as well as of the therapeutic techniques and the politics of health and institutional regulations. The analytical approach will be inter-disciplinary. The symposium will bring together anthropologists, sociologists and historians, putting a range of different perspectives into contact, from the codification and interpretation of medical texts to the everyday therapeutic practices of healers across South Asia.

Programme

Download programme schedule.

Organizers

• French Institute of Pondicherry
• Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS / CNRS/EHESS), Paris.

FUNDING

• French Institute of Pondicherry
• Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS / EHESS-CNRS)
• The Transversal Programme of the IFRE "Democratic Transformation", coordinated by the French Institute of South Africa
• Nomad Research Unit

Coordinators

• Caterina Guenzi (IFP / CEIAS)
• Laurent Pordié (IFP / CReCSS)
• Ines Zupanov (CEIAS).

Participants

• Madhulika Banerjee (Delhi University)
• Calum Blaikie (University of Kent)
• Pratik Chakrabarti (University of Kent)
• Burton Cleetus (IFP / Jawaharlal Nehru University)
• Caterina Guenzi (IFP / CEIAS)
• Stephan Kloos (UC Berkeley / San Francisco)
• Johannes Quack (University of Heidelberg)
• Harish Naraindas (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
• Laurent Pordié (IFP / CReCSS)
• William Sax (University of Heidelberg)
• Brigitte Sébastia (IFP / LISST, Toulouse)
• Kavita Sivaramakhrishnan (Delhi)
• Martin Saxer (University of Oxford)
• Frederick Smith (University of Iowa)
• Richard Weiss (Victoria University at Wellington)
• Francis Zimmermann (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
• Ines Zupanov (CNRS / CEIAS)

Venue

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