The Ills of Marginality: New Perspectives on Health in South Asia.

Social marginality and ill health can form an unholy dyad: firstly, groups who suffer from chronic or infectious diseases often find themselves pushed to the margins. Secondly, people who are already on the edge of society tend to suffer more from illness than those at the centre. In development discourse, marginal people are defined as those who are 'not yet' on the same level as the developed mainstream and are in urgent need of aid from the centre.

Healing rituals.

This paper poses a theoretical question: how, if at all, can 'critical medical anthropology' and 'performance theory' be combined? More specifically, the author discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of each, with respect to a healing cult in the Central Himalayas of North India. The paper has four parts: first, an ethnographic description of the cult itself; second, a brief introduction to critical medical anthropology; third, a short discussion of the performative approach to healing rituals; and finally, an attempt to combine the two approaches. The author concludes that the two approaches can indeed combined, so long as one recognizes (1) that caste and gender are also appropriate objects for critical medical anthropology; and (2) that aesthetics is always already political.