Organizer and Chair: Martha Ann Selby, Southern Methodist University
Discussant: McKim Marriott, University of Chicago
This panel will examine the production of medical knowledge and technology in classical and modern South Asia. All four panelists will comment specifically on issues of gender and empowerment by presenting new, ongoing research in the history of medicine and anthropology. Each panelist will present what loosely amounts to a medical "poetics" of the body by employing diverse disciplinary and methodological strategies. Selby’s paper is an exploration of the multiple meanings of the word garbha, in which she discusses the role of "voice" in Sanskrit medical discourse. For instance, does a fetus contribute to the production of its own identity as it expresses its desires through its mother’s cravings? Or are pregnancy cravings covert strategies through which a pregnant woman can assert her own demands and needs? Alter’s paper focuses specifically on the social and medical production of masculinity and empowerment by looking at early twentieth-century accounts of and prescriptions for specific "yogic" exercises, thereby exploring the relationship between body-building and nation-building. Van Hollen’s ethnographic research has uncovered a powerful link between pain and empowerment in modern South Indian birthing technologies, while Cohen examines paradigms which link kidney transplantation with larger social gestures comprising such issues as dowry and pregnancy, culminating in a meditation on "gift" and "debt." McKim Marriott, whose rich and generative writings on ethnosociology have informed the interpretive choices of the panelists, will offer his comments on the papers.
Constant Craving: Listening to the Voice of the Garbha in the Caraka- and Susruta-Samhitas
Martha Ann Selby, Southern Methodist University
This paper will explore the rich layers of ambivalence that emanate from the term garbha, which simultaneously means "fetus" and "womb" in the two earliest extant medical manuals written in Sanskrit, the Caraka-samhita (circa first century C.E.) and the Susruta-samhita (circa second century C.E.). In the production of gynecological and obstetrical knowledge in these two texts, many authoritative voices emerge: those of brahmins, Vedic sages, medical and ritual specialists, and the voices (both refuted and revered) of elderly, multiparous women, the apta striyah. Both texts include month-by-month descriptions of what should ideally happen to the garbha (in both senses of the word) during gestation. We find embedded within these narratives a number of different systems through which the voice of the fetus, as well, can be heard and interpreted through its mother’s desires: her pregnancy cravings are variously read as omens, as indicators of the gestating fetus’ personality type, and are also understood as the fetus’ own voice, communicating its intense wishes for substances and foods through its own personal "hot line" to the outside world as it exists in the condition of dohada ("two-heartedness") with its mother, a unique expression that is tied to and explained by the elegant system of color and visceral substance-coding accepted by both texts. This paper will examine issues of dividuation and personality formation during gestation in terms of fetal desire and maternal habit as the definition of garbha becomes increasingly monovalent during the last two trimesters of pregnancy.
Surya Namaskar: Solar Energy, Democracy at High Noon, and the Setting Imperial Sun in India
Joseph S. Alter, University of Pittsburgh
Surya Namaskar, or sun salutation exercise, has become an integral feature of many contemporary yoga routines practiced throughout the world even though there is significant debate as to whether it can be classified as yoga per se. Moreover, although Surya Namaskar exercise is said to be an ancient feature of Indian civilization—by way of its possible association with Vedic and pre-Vedic sun worship—it is, in fact, thoroughly modern on many different levels. Historically its modern form was developed and popularized by the Raja of Aundh in the early part of this century. In 1929 Bhavanrav Shrinivasrav Pant Pratinidhi published a book explaining the technique and extolling the virtues of Surya Namaskar. The book was revised, expanded and republished five times before 1940. It has been subsequently revised by the Raja’s son Apa Pant. Drawing on the history of yoga, physical education, and naturopathy in India during the first half of this century, in this paper I will show how, and explain why, the Raja of Aundh’s project made sense in the political, medical, and cultural climate of its time. I will argue that although the Raja’s project of health reform clearly fit with more general political, medical, and cultural trends, it was also unique in significant ways that help to shed light on the relationship between body discipline, political reform, and nationalism in modern India.
Invoking Vali: Painful Technologies of Modern Birth in South India
Cecelia Van Hollen, University of Califomia, Berkeley
As reproduction becomes increasingly biomedicalized throughout the globe, modern reproductive technologies are used in unique ways and imbued with different meanings in particular contexts. This paper attempts to explain why lower-class women in urban and semi-rural areas of Tamilnadu, South India are demanding to have their childbirth labors induced with painful oxytocin drugs and yet are wary of the prospect of using anesthesia to reduce the pain of birth. Modern drugs to induce labor are not only common in hospitals but are increasingly being used for home deliveries as well. I will focus on the ways in which cultural notions of women’s reproductive power, including concepts of cakti, tapas, and pavam, are evoked in discourses of modernity to explain why poor women in Tamilnadu today can, should, and must use these painful technologies of birth. Some argue that because poor women have an inherent ability to withstand pain, they can tolerate these new drugs. Others say the added intensity of these modern drugs will increase women’s divine power. And yet, many other women posit that modern lifestyles have weakened women’s bodies such that they no longer have strong contractions and must rely on modern drugs. In the context of these competing discourses, cultural concepts of women’s power and of women’s reproductive bodies are being reworked. I will discuss the ways in which these discourses on the relationship between gender, pain, and modernity relate to political-economic constraints of public maternity wards and justify discriminatory practices within these hospitals.
The Gender of Kidneys and the Space of the Ethical: The Production of Controversy in Indian Organ Transplantation
Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley
This essay considers the embodied and technical logics constituting the new global circulation of human organs as these are manifest in India’s traffic in kidneys and the forms of social and political anxiety it has generated. India became both a center for transplantation and a depot for organs in the late 1980s. National legislation to ban the sale of human organs and to restrict live donation was enacted in the mid-1990s, in part given the electoral threat of intensifying cycles of popular rumor about organ theft. Yet organ sales continue, as do both uncanny rumors and periodic "kidney racket" scandals in which doctors are arrested after donors charge they were cheated into giving up a kidney.
Through a multi-sited ethnography of these three processes of real and phantasmatic kidney exchange (formal transplantation and its logic of the market, criminal accusation and its logic of cheating, and uncanny rumor and its logic of theft), I argue that transplant controversies in India reveal a conceptual assemblage reworking culturally and historically particular logics of gift and debt. I focus on the ways kidney exchanges are gendered, examining both the organ traffic itself and its linkage to rhetorics of dowry, pregnancy, emasculation, and witchcraft. Building on earlier and ongoing Indian debates on exchange and corporeality, I close with Paul Rabinow’s discussion of "ethics" in France as contemporary purgatory, to outline a contrastive Indian space in which the ethical works to deny the increasing disjunction between the borders of the gift and the debt.