Download e-book for iPad: Recipes for Immortality: Healing, Religion, and Community in by Richard S Weiss

regardless of the worldwide unfold of Western scientific perform, conventional medical professionals nonetheless thrive within the sleek international. In Recipes for Immortality, Richard Weiss illuminates their persevered luck by means of analyzing the ways that siddha scientific practitioners in Tamil South India win the belief and patronage of sufferers. whereas biomedicine may perhaps alleviate a patient's actual misery, siddha medical professionals supply their consumers even more: association to a undying and natural group, the fable of a Tamil utopia, or even the possibility of immortality. They converse of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of conventional medication, drawing on broader revivalist formulations of a natural and historical Tamil community.
Weiss analyzes the luck of siddha medical professionals, targeting how they've got effectively garnered authority and credibility. whereas laying off mild on their lives, vocations, and aspirations, Weiss additionally records the demanding situations that siddha medical professionals face within the sleek global, either from a biomedical process that says common efficacy, and likewise from the rival conventional medication, ayurveda, that is promoted because the nationwide drugs of an self reliant Indian country. Drawing on ethnographic information; premodern Tamil texts on drugs, alchemy, and yoga; executive archival assets; university textbooks; and renowned literature on siddha medication and at the siddhar yogis, he provides an in-depth research of this conventional procedure of information, which serves the clinical wishes of hundreds of thousands of Indians.
Weiss concludes with a glance at conventional drugs at huge, and demonstrates that siddha medical professionals, regardless of resent developments towards globalization and biomedicine, mirror the broader political and spiritual dimensions of scientific discourse in our smooth global. Recipes for Immortality proves that scientific authority relies not just on actual effectiveness, but in addition on inventive procedures that relate to non-public and social identities, conceptions of heritage, secrecy, loss, and utopian promise.