Asymmetrical Conversations

Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices, such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as "natural" and unproblematic, we sometimes seek to bypass, circumvent, or even transcend the dominant ideologies of our cultures as they are manifested in the institutions of health care. The contributors to this volume describe such contestations and circumventions of health ideologies, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries, on the basis of case studies from India, the South Asian Diaspora, and Europe, focusing on relations between body, mind, and spirit in a variety of situations. The result is not always the "live and let live" medical pluralism that is described in the literature.

Harish Naraindas has taught at the Universities of Delhi, Iowa, Freiburg and Heidelberg. He is currently Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Iowa. He has published widely in leading journals on medical tourism and co-edited a special issue of Anthropology and Medicine (April 2011).

Johannes Quack is principal investigator of the Emmy Noether-Project "The Diversity of Nonreligion" at Goethe-University, Frankfurt. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the "Asia & Europe" Cluster of Excellence, Heidelberg University, and the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal. He is author of Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India (2012), and co-editor of The Problem of Ritual Efficacy (2010).

William S. Sax has taught at Harvard, Christchurch, Paris, and Heidelberg, where he is Chair of Ethnology at the South Asia Institute. His major works include Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Central Himalayan Pilgrimage (1991), The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia (1995), Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal (2002), God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in the Central Himalayas (2008), and The Problem of Ritual Efficacy (2010).