Healing and the mind-body complex: childbirth and medical pluralism in South Asia

This article attempts to put together two bodies of work I did at different times. The first was a kind of rethinking of anthropological theorising about mind, body and culture which was undertaken originally in the late 1980s in the context of a study of religion in Tibetan societies (Samuel 1990a, 1990b). The second area of research was in medical anthropology. In the late 1990s I undertook some research on medical pluralism in a Tibetan refugee community in North India (Samuel 1999, 2001a), and subsequently edited a book on childbirth in South and Southeast Asia along with my partner, Santi Rozario (Rozario and Samuel 2002a). I shall refer to some of the South and Southeast Asian childbirth research [here]