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Recipes for Immortality: Healing, Religion, and Community in South India Book
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA 2009-02-19 | 272 Pages | ISBN: 0195335236 | PDF |
Despite the global spread of Western medical practice, traditional doctors still thrive in the modern world.
In Recipes for Immortality, Richard Weiss illuminates their continued success by examining the ways in
which siddha medical practitioners in Tamil South India win the trust and patronage of patients. While
biomedicine might alleviate a patient's physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more:
affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of
immortality. They speak of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of traditional medicine, drawing on
broader revivalist formulations of a pure and ancient Tamil community.
Weiss analyzes the success of siddha doctors, focusing on how they have successfully garnered authority
and credibility. While shedding light on their lives, vocations, and aspirations, Weiss also documents the
challenges that siddha doctors face in the modern world, both from a biomedical system that claims
universal efficacy, and also from the rival traditional medicine, ayurveda, which is promoted as the national
medicine of an autonomous Indian state. Drawing on ethnographic data; premodern Tamil texts on
medicine, alchemy, and yoga; government archival resources; college textbooks; and popular literature
on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, he presents an in-depth study of this traditional system of
knowledge, which serves the medical needs of millions of Indians.
Weiss concludes with a look at traditional medicine at large, and demonstrates that siddha doctors, despite
resent trends toward globalization and biomedicine, reflect the wider political and religious dimensions of
medical discourse in our modern world. Recipes for Immortality proves that medical authority is based not
only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social
identities, conceptions of history, secrecy, loss, and utopian promise.
