Hereditary Physicians of Kerala by Indudharan Menon

Author:Indudharan Menon [Menon, Indudharan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science, Sociology, Asia, India & South Asia, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Customs & Traditions, Social History
ISBN: 9780429663123
Google: xouADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-12-18T01:34:27+00:00

3

Folk healing, poison therapy and Muslim Ayurvedic lineages

The two previous chapters highlighted geographical and historical factors that shaped the development of medical practice in Kerala and different sociocultural contexts in which medical knowledge was produced and transmitted. We depicted the heterogeneous nature of Kerala’s indigenous medical practices, which reflects the local diversity of castes and ethnicity, and the cross-pollination of knowledge between physicians belonging to different communities that shaped Kerala’s traditional medical ethos. We saw that traditional hereditary physicians functioning in Kerala’s feudal and ritualistic society relied on local beliefs and religious ideologies as sources of power and legitimacy. This and the next chapter will be devoted to different individual actors at a micro-level. We will be focusing on an array of traditionally trained hereditary practitioners who are representative of the heterogeneity of indigenous medical practices in the part of Kerala in which fieldwork and research were conducted. We may consider the stories of this cross-section of medical practitioners as constituting, so to say, a fractal image of the status and predicament of Kerala’s hereditary medical traditions in the modern context.

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