Joseph S. Alter

Heaps of health, metaphysical fitness: Ayurveda and the ontology of good health in medical anthropology.

Because most scholars take it for granted that medicine is concerned with healing and problems of ill health, the way in which various medical systems define good health has not been adequately studied. Moreover, good health as such is usually regarded as a natural, normative state of being even by most medical anthropologists, who otherwise take a critical, relativist perspective on the subject of illness, pain, and disease. Using the case of Ayurvedic medicine, this article shows that there is a very different way of looking at the question of how health is embodied. This perspective is proactive and concerned with overall fitness rather than reactive and primarily concerned with either illness or disease. The argument presented here therefore seeks to go beyond the limiting—although extremely useful—orientation of remedial health care and suggests a radical challenge to some of the most basic ontological assumptions in the cross‐cultural comparative study of medical systems.

Indian Clubs and Colonialism: Hindu Masculinity and Muscular Christianity

Following Edward Saids Orientalism (1978), there has been considerable interest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy 1996; Grewal 1996; Yegenoglu 1998), and how colonized men were often regarded as either effeminate or “martial” by virtue of their birth into a particular group. Arguably, the latent ambiguity of regarding all colonized men as effete, and yet categorizing some colonized men as strong and aggressively virile, points to one of the many complex contradictions manifest in the cultural politics of colonialism. A similar point could be made with regard to nationalism, wherein women, and the image men want women to present of themselves, reflects masculine ambivalence about modernity (Chatterjee 1993). In any case, even when colonial discourse essentializes the virile masculinity of various subject groups—in particular the so-called martial castes of South Asia (Hopkins 1889; MacMunn 1977)—the putative masculinity of these groups is ascribed to breeding and latent “savagery,” and is rarely, if ever, conceived of as an achieved status, much less something an individual from some other group might achieve on the basis of training or practice.

Yoga at the Fin de Siècle: Muscular Christianity with a ‘Hindu’ Twist

This paper examines what came to be known as muscular Hinduism and its expression through yoga practices in India. It argues that identifying Anglo-American muscular Christianity as the locus point for the configuration of ideas that link the body to morality is a colonial distortion. Christianity is the primary referent for muscularity at the fin de siècle, but to properly understand muscular Christianity one must think much more broadly about emerging concerns about the relationship between the body, morality and society in different parts of the world during this period. Apart from the distorting prismatic of colonialism and nationalism, Christianity itself does not provide a comprehensive perspective on religion and moral values. The development of yoga as a system of metaphysical fitness at the fin de siècle can only be understood if the frame of reference is global, rather than colonial and nationalistic, and if one looks at Christianity, Hinduism and other ideological articulations of belief in terms of a world history of religious ideas at this period of time.

A therapy to live by: Public health, the self and nationalism in the practice of a North Indian yoga society

In this article I focus on the relationship between concepts of self and health in modern North India. Drawing on field research in a popular yoga society, I argue that yoga therapy, as practiced by the Bharatiya Yog Sansthan of Delhi, provides a reconceptualization of what can be meant by public health. Using studies that challenge both the essentialist and epistemological facticity of the self, I show how the discourse and practice of yoga is implicated in, and derived from, a complex search for self definition in terms of health; health which is conceived of as a public regimen that seeks to reconnect that which modernity has broken apart: mind and body.

Subaltern Bodies and Nationalist Physiques: Gama the Great and the Heroics of Indian Wrestling

Born into a poor, Muslim family at the end of the 19th century, Gama became World Champion wrestler by defeating the reigning Polish champion in London in 1910. By focusing on the life of Gama, the heroic representations of Gama that appear in the Hindi language literature, and the transformations in wrestling regimens that have occurred over the past several centuries, I locate the discourse and practice of wrestling within a context of intersecting concerns with nationalism, class identity and embodied consciousness. To articulate the way in which subaltern identity is embodied in relation to nationalist ideas about masculine fitness, and in relation to the state as a political institution, I provide an analytic interpretation of the heroic body that focuses on themes of nervousness and obsession.

The Once and Future "Apeman"

Many have argued that anthropology, as a four‐field discipline, lacks intellectual coherence. Recent developments in the field of biotechnology and the possibility of producing chimeras with recognizable human characteristics make it necessary to think in terms of a new kind of “old” four‐field holism. The production of a human/nonhuman chimera raises theoretical questions about the nature of the species barrier in human evolution and about the larger philosophical question of the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. Engaging with these questions provides critical perspective on the evolution of Homo sapiens and on the relationship between culture and biology in the human past as this past increasingly anticipates the future.

Nature Cure and Ayurveda Nationalism, Viscerality and Bio-ecology in India

Nationalism can be closely associated with powerful feelings about the relationship among cultural heritage, identity and embodied experience. Almost by definition this relationship is expressed in terms of continuity, distinctiveness and the purity of tradition, to an extent that nationalistic sentiments can be said to be ‘visceral.’ Contrasting the way in which the body is implicated in nature cure and Ayurveda, two forms of medicine closely linked to nationalism in India, this article presents an analytical perspective on the embodiment of viscerality to provide a more nuanced understanding of how these experiences blur distinctions of cultural continuity and how an ecology of the body shapes the cultural politics of tradition in India.

Yoga in Asia—Mimetic History: Problems in the Location of Secret Knowledge

On one level, and with reference to a specific frame of reference, embodied forms of practice that have come to be associated with Yoga and Taoist philosophy appear to be very similar if not identical in terms of form, structure, and purpose. However, there is no clear-cut history of communication between eastern and southern Asia concerning the exchange of ideas linked to these practices, and where some scholars presume direct, linear exchange, and obvious congruity, others see radical difference and discontinuity. Taking the inspired work of the Bengali scholar Prabodh Candar Bagchi as a point of departure-and eternal return-the argument presented here is twofold. First, it is highly problematic to conceptualize cross-cultural contact in the premodern period not just in terms of the modern geopolitics of nationalism-which is fairly obvious-but also in terms of a history of ideas that is itself structured by modernity. Second, secret knowledge transforms what is in fact impossible-immortality, transcendence, enlightenment-into a historical vortex that is both local and global. Mimetic history is the recursive pattern, structured through the paradox of secrecy, whereby the impossibility of embodied enlightenment is reflected in forms of practice that, in terms of both time and space, endlessly anticipate perfection.

Rethinking the history of medicine in Asia: Hakim Mohammed Said and the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine.

In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Saids interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by his trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Saids advocacy of Eastern Medicine provides a way to think about the history of medicine and medical revitalization that is not limited by colonial, postcolonial, or nationalist assumptions and priorities.

Sacrifice, the Body, and Yoga: Theoretical Entailments of Embodiment in Hathayoga

Abstract In most general terms, hathayoga involves the internalisation and embodied literalisation of the Vedic fire sacrifice. Reflecting on the place of sacrifice in anthropological theory, and on the way in which sacrifice structures the relationship between humans and gods in terms of gift obligations, this paper explores the theoretical implications of hathayogas embodied literalisation of a profoundly symbolic act. Although similar to various forms of ascetic renunciation, hathayoga is unique, it will be argued, in being structured as the physiological antithesis of religious ritual. Self-realisation based on the internalised yajna sacrifice undermines the binary structure of the sacred and the profane and makes god irrelevant. This raises theoretical questions concerning the social significance of a ritual that is anti-social on a number of different levels.