Medical Mimesis: Healing Signs of a Cosmopolitan "Quack"

Abstract

Drawing on recent insights into mimesis, I address the question of authenticity in indigenous medicine through an ethnography of an Ayurvedic pulse reader. I trace the conflicting rhetorics of authenticity spun by the doctor, the colleagues who consider him a quack, and myself. Ultimately I question the rituals of signification by which distinctions are drawn between medicine and placebo, doctor and quack, expertise and gimmickry, and between authentic cultural object and consumeroriented copy, [medicine, mimesis, semiotics, Ayurveda, India, quackery]