Abstract :
Despite decades of research on India’s plural health care market, the
practices of many local health traditions outside the allopathic and
codified traditions are under-studied. Drawing on interview and
observational data, this paper explores the space in which
indigenous traditional Khasi healers in Meghalaya state, northeast
India, practice. Khasi indigenous healers describe themselves as
doktor sla, plant doctors, to distinguish themselves from doktor kot,
or book doctors. This distinction operates as a rhetorical resource,
utilised to carve a distinct sphere of expertise in relation to the
allopathic sector, and to mark claims for the specifically local
appropriateness of traditional practices within a shifting market of
state-sponsored provision. Khasi healers are a heterogeneous group
who treat a wide variety of conditions, including physical ailments
which have no obvious correlates in biomedical systems, and
musculoskeletal disorders, with which they have recognised
expertise. In addition to claiming these discrete strengths, healers
also present themselves as accommodating deficiencies in
biomedicine, including inherent generic weaknesses of allopathic
care as well as specific local gaps in rural health care provision.
Thus, the expertise niches of traditional healers have evolved
through their interactions with, and the needs of, the community,
but also through managing a shifting boundary with biomedical
practitioners, who are explicitly sceptical of their efficacy, but tacitly
accepting of the ways in which they manage the gaps in biomedical
provision. While codified non-biomedical traditions in India have
engaged in universalising professionalising projects, in this setting
at least, non-codified practitioners have instead utilised discourses
of localism.
Title of Article :
Doktor Kot, Doktor Sla – book doctors, plant doctors and the segmentation of the medical market place in Meghalaya, northeast India
Author/Authors :
Albert, Sandra , Porter, John , Green, Judith
