Ritual healing and mental health in India.

Ritual healing is very widespread in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and is by far the most common option for those with serious behavioral disturbances. Although ritual healing thus accounts for a very large part of the actual health care system, the state and its regulatory agencies have, for the most part, been structurally blind to its existence. A decade of research on in this region, along with a number of shorter research trips to healing shrines and specialists elsewhere in the subcontinent, and a thorough study of the literature, suggest that such techniques are often therapeutically effective.

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.