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The Dai and the Indigenous: Notes on the Appearance and Disappearance of a Figure in the Therapeutics of a Nation book cover

1st Edition

The Dai and the Indigenous Notes on the Appearance and Disappearance of a Figure in the Therapeutics of a Nation

By Asha Achuthan Copyright 2025
288 Pages
by Routledge

288 Pages
by Routledge

288 Pages
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This is a book about the dai , or traditional birth practitioner, and her place in the emerging therapeutic domain in colonial and contemporary India.  The book employs a caste-informed feminist reading of the colonial archive against the grain and explores papers by Englishwomen physicians, texts of indigenous medicine and practitioner accounts, administrative documents, public... Read more

Acknowledgements

 

Chapter 1

Introduction: the dai and the terrain of indigenous practice

 

Chapter 2

Historiographies of science and medicine in India

 

Chapter 3

Revisiting the clinical encounter I: sites and meanings of an emerging indigenous therapeutics

 

Chapter 4

Revisiting the clinical encounter II: the emergence of the dai in the management of populations

 

Chapter 5

The nation and its women: re-examining an old preoccupation

 

Chapter 6

Indigenous therapeutics in the present, the recalibration of the expert domain, and the place of the dai

 

Index                             

Biography

Asha Achuthan is Assistant Professor at the Advanced Centre for Women's Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay, India.

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