Ayurvedic Interiors: Person, Space, and Episteme in Three Medical Practices

Ayurveda is the name given to a complex of South Asian healing practices that have been traced back as far as 600 B.C. Ethnographers argue that the phenomenology of health in Ayurveda, particularly its formulations of person and illness, are culturally distinct from those of biomedicine (also referred to as modern medicine or allopathy).' They note that psychic and somatic components of health, which are isolated from one another in the biomedical paradigm, are integrated in the Ayurvedic paradigm. Ethnographers also observe that while biomedicine conceives the body and person as solid and bounded, Ayurveda conceives the body and person as fluid and penetrable, engaged in a continuous interchange with the social and natural environment (Kakar 1982; Zimmermann 1987). Thus, Ayurveda frequently frames illness as socio-psychosomatic distress and understands patients as part of an enclosing social, climatic, or cosmic field (Nichter 1981; von Schmadel and Hochkirchen 1987). Moreover, many ethnographers demonstrate that while biomedicine configures illness as a discrete entity, Ayurveda configures illness as a disruption in delicate somatic, climatic, and social systems of balance (Kakar 1982; Trawick 1991; Zimmermann 1987). If biomedicine generally understands body, person, and illness as objects, Ayurveda generally understands body, person, and illness as processes and patterns of relationships. Research focused on the historical praxis of contemporary Ayurveda addresses the adaptations of Ayurveda to the complex medical field of 20thcentury South Asia. In the early 19th century, the structure of Ayurvedic training was a guru-disciple apprenticeship located in nonhospital settings.2 Political and historical studies document the standardization of Ayurveda through the introduction, early in this century, of institutions such as medical colleges, profes-