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.That is to say, the translatability of culture is not only aphilosophical or scholarly issue but a political one as well.In their critiques of indig-enous medicine, biomedical doctors have argued for a single standard of rational-ity and a universal truth that they assert to be most fully exemplified in their ownpractices.Siddha practitioners invoke the principle of the incommensurability oftraditions as a discursive strategy to counter the universalist challenge of those,both British and Indian, who have promoted biomedicine over the past two centu-ries.These vaidyas represent tradition as a sovereign realm which the critical gazeof an external, universalizing rationality cannot penetrate.Orientalist BodiesIn addition to invoking the relative truth of tradition and the difficulties of trans-lation to argue against a piecemeal appropriation of their knowledge, vaidyas maketwo sorts of spatial arguments about the uniqueness of Indian medicine.One ofthese spatial discourses speaks of internal and external aspects of the human bodyand of cosmic processes writ large, arguing that although Western biomedicinemight hold its own in its understanding of the surface features of the body, Indiantraditional medicine grasps the deeper, nonphysical elements of illness and healing.The second is a geographical argument that Indian medicine and Indian bodies areautochthonous, asserting that Indian medicine is compatible with Indian bodiesand that Western medicine is alien to India and therefore ineffective for Indians.Vaidyas claim a deep understanding of the interior, metaphysical aspects ofthe body.In doing so they reflect the conclusions of Orientalist scholarship, whichhold that the expertise of the West is in its knowledge the physical world, andthe strength of Oriental knowledge lies in its investigation of spiritual, mystical28 recipes for immortalityworlds.For some vaidyas, the coexistence of a materialistic Western science andtraditional knowledge of the intangible person offers the possibility for the coop-eration of medical systems, or even for their integration into a complete medicine.For example, in the proceedings of the decennial celebration of the GovernmentCollege of Integrated Medicine, held in 1957, S.Nijalingappa, the chief minister ofMysore, wrote:  I think it is time that men of medical science should cast off preju-dice or bias towards one system of medicine or the other and with an open mindlearn from all systems and above all endeavour to know more of man his hered-ity, his mental, spiritual and mystical potentialities apart from what little of himis revealed by the application of the several branches of science such as physiology,pathology, psychology, etc. 38For other vaidyas, however, the disparity between Western and Indian medi-cine provides a space for traditional medicine apart from the universalizing, impe-rial aspirations of biomedicine.Whereas Europeans invoked Orientalist schemasto justify colonialism as a civilizing mission, vaidyas use them to define uniquespaces for traditional knowledge.39 They caricature the supposed mastery of physi-cal processes achieved by Western sciences as superficial while claiming that Indianknowledge successfully accounts for both physical and nonphysical processes, andalso that Indian practitioners correctly understand the relationship between thesetwo spheres.Vaidyas have indeed long posited both physical and nonphysical mat-ter and processes in the cosmos, both of which are relevant to illness and healing.Today, siddha vaidyas cite the siddhars as the first thinkers to have classified theworld according to its inner and exterior components.They  had divided every-thing in the cosmos and the body into two classes: those physical objects that arecomposed of the five material elements and those subtle objects. 40 Likewise, draw-ing from yogic views of the body, scholars and practitioners of Indian medicine likeT.V.Sambasivam Pillai distinguish a gross, physical body from an invisible, subtlebody:  There are two kinds of structures in humans one is the external structureof the body, and the other is the internal form.The former is conventionally knownas the corporeal body and the other is called the subtle body.Therefore, if we knowthe structure of the internal body, then we will easily know, by means of the rootsubstance, human diseases and their remedies [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]