Engrained with modernity: commodification, medicalisation, and cross-border medical travel for health care in Nepal

Abstract

Biomedicine was introduced in Nepal by Christian Missionaries en route to Tibet and China. When Nepal entered the democratic era in the early 60s, a considerable influx of biomedicine was brought into Nepal by the modernizing state as part of the promise of national development. After the 60s, biomedicine expanded in Nepal mainly through private sector involvement. This had consequences in the health-care domain in Nepal including the commodification of health-care services and increasing medicalization. The practice and expansion of biomedicine is also closely associated with its social and cultural mediation. This article focuses to examine how the macro process of health development shaped the medical practices, especially the healing trajectories and cross-border medical travel of Maithili Brahmin women from Nepal’s Tarai. This article shows that the three prominent avenues of health-care services, namely, medicalization, commodification, and cross-border medical travel predominant in the study area, are thriving and intertwined in such a way that they are reciprocally strengthening each other. This article is based on primary ethnographic data generated from field research conducted in a social cluster among the women from Nepal’s Tarai.