Becoming well in Kerala: marked and unmarked spacetimes of Ayurveda
Date
2019
Authors
Hall, Bronwyn Jayne
Editors
Advisors
Lucas, Rodney
Drew, Georgina
Drew, Georgina
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Thesis
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Abstract
This dissertation concerns the lived experience of wellbeing in Kerala, India. It focuses on the daily lives of local Malayalee women, based on a fieldwork period from January 2016 to January 2017. Often defined as a state of being comfortable, healthy or happy, wellbeing is an ontological abstraction, but also, in the practices that produce it, a matter of routine tasks and mundane activity. The routine tasks and activities that fundamentally shape daily lives in Malayalee homes are non-textual ayurvedic daily care routines (dinacharya) and seasonal care routines (rtucharya). However, in a society that does not easily separate an ayurvedic way of living from a Malayalee one, those routines are largely unrecognised, unmarked as Ayurveda and instead absorbed into the everyday and gendered cultural expectations of being Malayalee. In these ‘unmarked spacetimes of Ayurveda’ I ethnographically explore how Malayalee women – as ‘physicians of the house’ – enact dinacharya and rtucharya in their shared knowledges and ingestive practices. Women discuss their health on the back steps of houses. From their kitchens, they decoct and consume the medicinal substances that spontaneously grow in the dirt around their homes. Women spend their lifetimes realising and contesting culturally gendered and idealised forms of the ‘good woman’ and the ‘perfect wife’ in performativities that are intimately tied to Ayurveda from the first days of postnatal care. To examine the ways Malayalee women variously engage with everyday Ayurveda and their own wellbeing in unmarked spacetimes, this ethnography is broadly positioned within a new materialist ontology. Therein, I draw specifically on non-representational theory, a body of work that has grown from cultural geographies to emphasise the materiality of bodies, objects and landscapes, their emergent and generative processes, and the spatio-temporal realities they generate in practice. Ayurveda is also materialised and spatialised in hospitals, clinics, factories and educational institutions — in the ‘marked spacetimes of Ayurveda’. Taking pioneering female physicians’ own experiences, I explore how women have come to dominate the marked spacetimes of Ayurveda. Although women comprise some 90% of enrolments in the Bachelor of Ayurveda Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) degree in Kerala, many return home after graduation not as practicing doctors, but as ‘Dr Housewife’ to look after the wellbeing of their families. An increasing number of scholars have become interested in the turn to ‘anthropologies of the good’ and thus in ethnographically and theoretically broadening our understanding of what it means to be well in everyday life across cultural contexts. This dissertation takes what Malayalee women value, and what they embody in ayurvedic and prosaic acts of everyday concern, to offer a spatio-temporally situated anthropology of wellbeing.
School/Discipline
Anthropology & Development Studies
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Anthropology & Development Studies, 2019
Provenance
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