Reinventing Medical Traditions: The Professionalization of Ayurveda in Contemporary America

The dissertation examines the professionalization of Ayurvedic medicine since its introduction into the U.S.A. in the mid-1980s as a holistic alternative to biomedical orthodoxy. A central premise of the thesis is that transplanted Ayurveda is shaped not only by American medical culture, but by millennial heterodox elements of American religious culture, such as the loose cluster of beliefs and practices known as the ‘New Age’. Because New Age Ayurvedic medical practices occupy the broad ideological middle ground between medicine and metaphysics, and the broad statutory middle ground of “nonmedical health professions”, their main professionalizing dilemma becomes: whether to emphasize the religious aspect of their activities, or to present themselves as practising branches of medicine. Through an ethnographic focus on Ayurvedic practices in Western New England, and a method that combines observations and interviews with media analyses, the dissertation examines this professionalizing dilemma in three arenas: the clinical arena of therapeutic practice; the legal-ethical arena of regulations surrounding alternative medical practice; and the popular arena of print media representations. In each of these arenas, Ayurveda\u27s encounters with the New Age fundamentally transform its ethical practices, phenomenology, and portrayals in the media. Far from being a monolith, Ayurveda also reveals a wide-ranging plurality of sub-traditions in practice. The thesis examines four of these sub-traditions, each of which reflects different articulations with the New Age. The goal for each of these sub-traditions is not simply how to gain professional status vis-`a-vis biomedicine, but how to demarcate separate professional identities within the rapidly converging alternative medical movement itself. Taken together, they suggest a variety of professionalizing routes that Ayurveda can follow other than licensing and institutional credentialization. They also suggest multiple ways in which Ayurveda is reinvented in America: as a system of dietary restraint; as rejuvenation and radical therapy; as naturalistic massage; and as spiritual regimen