Illness, health and culture: Anthropological perspectives on ethno-medicine in India

Abstract

The field of medical anthropology has been a torch runner in highlighting the deep yet often overlooked nexus between the notions of health, illness and disease with the cultural modalities of a particular group or population in dealing with healthcare issues like prevention, conception, attribution, causation, cure and management of various maladies that time and often affect humans and are universally found in all societies. In an increasingly globalized world, the need to understand local medical systems vis-à-vis the cosmopolitan biomedical system is as strenuous a task as significant, for the twin reasons of arriving at a more efficacious system built on strengths of both in order to provide better healthcare and systematizing the existing knowledge of various communities in order to preserve or augment the cultural milieus of effective health systems. The developing and under developed regions of the world including India have been a focus area for such studies. With countries like India that also possess ancient and documented health systems like Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, etc., the situation becomes more complex as the task of medical anthropologists and health planners involves not only effectively utilizing indigenous systems of health but also national systems of health alongside the cosmopolitan system. This chapter is an attempt to discuss some of these perspectives on health and illness grounded in culture through various bio-cultural studies done in India on indigenous medical systems or ethno-medicine along with other pan India systems of medicine. This chapter draws upon various empirical observations in order to deal with numerous themes related to ethno-medicine and cultural nuances of health and illness.