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Medical Mimesis: Healing Signs of a Cosmopolitan "Quack"
Author(s) -
Langford Jean M.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1999.26.1.24
Subject(s) - quackery , semiotics , object (grammar) , indigenous , aesthetics , ethnography , literature , sociology , medicine , art , philosophy , anthropology , alternative medicine , linguistics , pathology , ecology , biology
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]