Re-Thinking the ‘Medical’ through the Lens of the ‘Indigenous’

Abstract

This chapter analyses material from a contemporary anthropological study of women seeking healing in Mahanubhav temples in Maharashtra to explore how the ‘medical’ is invoked in narratives of indigenous healing. I argue that the conceptual differentiation between ‘biomedical’ and ‘indigenous’ healing systems, often referred to in the literature on medical pluralism, is in fact at odds with people’s everyday lived experiences of healing. Women’s complicated ‘healing pathways’ reflected alternation between biomedical and indigenous healing, determined by various circumstances and factors. Such fluidity was also permitted by the temple discourses of healing, which described Mahanubhav temples as ‘hospitals’, thereby proving the ‘modern’ and ‘rationalist’ temper of the shrines, even while maintaining the greater efficacy of these temples vis-à-vis biomedical treatment for healing spirit afflictions.