How the Body Speaks
How the Body Speaks
This chapter examines the ways in which illness is made knowable in the course of clinical and social transactions by focusing on one of the neighborhoods in East Delhi, Bhagwanpur Kheda. More specifically, it considers the way people interact with health practitioners and understand their illnesses, along with the frequency of their visits to the practitioners. Drawing on a survey of sample households in Delhi over a two-year period (2001–2003) carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Socio-Economic Research in Development and Democracy (ISERDD), the chapter shows that there are no firm epistemic understandings of why illness happens; people often put together a narrative of illness that borrows vocabularies from different medical systems (Ayurvedic, allopathic) as well as vocabularies of the occult. It suggests that there are no well-made ontologies that could account for the movement between disease as it inhabits the human body versus when it exists as an abstraction in textbooks or other discursive forms.
Keywords: illness, East Delhi, Bhagwanpur Kheda, health practitioners, Institute of Socio-Economic Research in Development and Democracy, occult, disease, human body
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