Possession, purgatives or Prozac? The experience of illness and the process of healing in Kerala, South India.

摘要

This study is set in the state of Kerala, south India, a region that is known for its diversity of healing systems and for specializing in psychiatric aspects of ayurveda, an indigenous medicine of India. This dissertation examines the experience of patients and the methods of treatment of ayurvedic psychiatry, allopathic (western, biomedical) psychiatry and religious therapies (including Hindu, Muslim and Christian healing centers). Anthropological studies of the body, which have provided an important corrective to earlier mentalistic, representational biases, are critiqued in this study for having also created a dichotomy according to which westerners, experience the world in terms of a mind-body dualism while the experience of everyone else is more grounded in the body. As an alternative to this reductionist dichotomy, I suggest that anthropologists examine specific phenomenologies---constellations of mind, body, consciousness and other modes of experience---and I present a local phenomenology of Kerala. This study will also examine a concern in Kerala for the quality of the process of undergoing treatment. A comparison of ayurvedic and allopathic psychiatric healing procedures and patient experiences indicate that ayurvedic psychiatry considers that the healing process should be at best pleasant and at least non-traumatic, while allopathic psychiatric techniques appeared less concerned about the process of therapy and more focussed on achieving "cure" (a term which, I will argue, has been uncritically applied in medical anthropology).;Meanwhile, modes of expressing illness are changing in Kerala. Many healers made the observation that cases of spirit possession are becoming less common and people are expressing problems using English language psychological terminology, such as "depression" and "tension." I explore trends such as literacy, secularism and the promotion of allopathic psychiatric and western psychological discourse in the media that appear to relate to these changes.