Alignments? X-ray Diversions, Haptics, Credibility--With a 'Bone-Setting' Clinic in Hyderabad City.

In this article, I engage with the diversions of technologies conventionally used for diagnostic scanning among practitioners who perform fracture-reduction and related manual interventions around bodily pain, ostensibly outside the mainstream orthopedic sector, in the city of Hyderabad, south central India. I attend to the performative dimensions of a technology-practice assemblage, and show how enactments of fracture reduction as viable and credible, targeted at establishment orthopedic surgeons, have been enabled through a distributive agency, afforded by scanning technologies. The use of X-rays and other medical scanning technologies by nonbiomedical practitioners have not displaced haptic and other technics of embodied knowledge, but they have been mobilized in order to create wider recognition of the practitioners' skills.

Compromised: making institutions and indigenous medicine in Mysore State, circa 1908-1940.

This is a study of the emergence of new institutional arenas for ayurveda and yunani medicine, collectivized at the time as 'indigenous medicine,' in a semi-autonomous State (Mysore) in late colonial India. The study argues that the characteristic dimensions of this process were compromise and misalignment between ideals of governance and modes of pedagogy and practice. Running counter to a narrative that the Princely States such as Mysore were instrumental for the 'preservation' of ayurveda, this study analyzes the process of negotiation and struggle between a variety of actors engaged with shaping the direction of institutionalized 'indigenous medicine'.