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  • Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms
  • Martha Ann Selby
Dagmar Wujastyk and Frederick M. Smith, eds. Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms. New York: State University of New York Press, 2008. xiii + 349 pp. Ill. $89.50 (cloth, 978-0-7914-7489-1), $29.95 (paperbound, 978-0-7914- 7490-7).

Based on the papers presented at a 2004 public conference held at the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research at the University of Cambridge, this superb collection offers its readers far more than the run-of-the-mill proceedings volume. In their excellent introduction, the editors state that the goal of the book is to present “an account of recent developments in the long history of Ayurveda . . . in the face of three major challenges: (1) British colonialism and the dominance of allopathic medicine, (2) the pressures of modernization, and (3) Ayurveda’s diaspora into the world beyond the boundaries of South Asia” (p. 1). The editors offer a concise portrait of the history of Ayurveda (pp. 4 –6), noting the shift from traditional transmission from teacher to student to Ayurveda’s ultimate “biomedicalization” (p. 8), a result of professionalization and the creation of state-sanctioned Ayurvedic colleges in India.

Wujastyk and Smith usefully identify four paradigms of global Ayurveda: (1) New Age Ayurveda, (2) Ayurveda as mind-body medicine, (3) Maharishi Ayurveda (or MAV), and (4) traditional Ayurveda in an urban world (p. 11), providing us with a keen sense of the global Ayurvedic marketplace. What emerge over the course of this book are sometimes harrowing tales of paranoia, insistence on secrecy, eclectic nuttiness, and self-legitimizing efforts by individuals and institutions that go wildly awry. The editors have more than exceeded their goal. They [End Page 306] describe just how the findings presented in this book “can help us assess recent developments in one of the world’s most ancient and continuously practiced medical systems as it seeks a place in the modern world” (p. 23). In the sixteen articles that follow, all of them well written and of a consistently high quality, a veritable narrative emerges, relating a sad, epic tale of a classical system compelled to continually reinvent itself in the face of the history of capricious and competing market forces.

Mike Saks details the conflict between allopathy and “alternative therapies,” noting that one culture’s “orthodox” medicine is seen as another’s “alternative” medicine, which gives rise to interesting oscillations in viewpoint between the poles of East and West. Medical historian Dominik Wujastyk writes on control, regulation, and the creation of policy during India’s colonial period, focusing not on “the evolution of government acts but [on] the discussions that preceded them, in which policy was formed prior to legislation” (p. 44).

Richard Weiss’s essay is on the self-articulation of Tamil Siddha medicine as a system separate from Ayurveda. Weiss sees Siddha as an expression of twentieth-century Tamil revivalism, with its utopian notions of Tamil as the origin of all languages, all cultures, all medicines—as the ultimate primogenitor of all world systems. Rachel Berger’s article is on medical writing and the making of class. Berger charts the phenomenon of “professionalization” from home-based, traditional learning to earning a degree in a state-sanctioned institution, emphasizing the importance of certification.

Robert E. Svoboda then offers his own unusual perspective as “the first Westerner to graduate from a college of Ayurveda and be licensed to practice Ayurveda in India” (p. 337). In many ways, this essay serves as the heart of the volume and is written in a very personal and evocative voice. Writing in a poetic vein, Svoboda notes that “some of the rough edges of contemporary Ayurveda have been rubbed off as it has tumbled in the drum of the world,” but, as he also notes, its political edges have become sharper (p. 122). Svoboda brings up issues of community divisiveness in the diaspora, noting that fractures along religious, caste, and linguistic lines do not exist in, for example, Chinese diasporic communities, due to which acupuncture and other Chinese medical practices have enjoyed greater success and much wider acceptance in mainstream Euro-American societies.

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