Are Traditional Healthcare Practices an Integral Part among Indigenous Tribal Communities ? A Socio-Cultural and Health Discourse from Rural Odisha

Traditional health practices are unique in rural Odisha among the indigenous tribal communities. All tribal communities have their own health-seeking practices that are culture-specific and there are operative within their own social and natural environment for their good health. However, due to globalization and the modernization process, their well-cherished traditional health practices are vanishing drastically. Here, the study aims to recollect and redefine the traditional health practices reviving the tribal cultures in transition. The paper also critically put forth discourse and debate around the notion of body and health with reference to tribes. The paper also will explore four objectives in detail; firstly, the concept of traditional health practices, traditional healers, and traditional healing practices; secondly, to objectively study the social and cultural construction of folk healers in the tribal locality; thirdly, to see the discourse of medical pluralism that contesting between traditional and modern medicine; fourthly, to study the very notion of totems, rituals, and healings among the tribal community and see the essence of Gurus, rituals, and families. The paper is based on in-depth interviews and some case studies which put forth the analysis of traditional health practices among tribal communities in rural Odisha. In order to study the problems and contextualize the situation of tribes, health and healers; the study requires ethnomedicine and self-curing technique methods. However, the approach to study this problem requires a biomedical model, interactionist model, behavioral model of health, and social and cultural context model; so to say the study is based on a mixed approach. According to this study, it is observed that in Odisha most of the healthcare facilities are available but then utilization of public healthcare is very rare. The tribal community prefers the indigenous system of medicine rather than biomedicine (which is expensive and costly). They are more comfortable and familiar with traditional healthcare practices than modern or public healthcare practices. However, as the tribal culture is in the transition phase, the traditional health practices are vanishing due to the process of change, hegemonic and superiority model of biomedicine through the pharmaceutical company, advertisement, and media