The six review essays in this collection emerge from a joint launch of five books and one dissertation/ book-in-progress and a panel at the recent annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. In these meetings, each author provided a reading of another’s text, then revisited their own work in light of the resonances and dissonances that arose.
Addressing lab-based …
I dream of a black cat. She jumps over a barbed wire fence, and across it. She leaps from one side of the fence to the other. Her coat glistens in the moonlight. Except for the gentle sound of her purring, the village where I stand is silent.
The silence was unnerving. Even remote villages were rarely silent along the …
Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences
University of Chicago Press, 2016. 376 pages.
In a sequel to his 2009 Nationalizing the Body, Projit Bihari Mukharji returns to late-colonial South Asia to investigate the modernization of Ayurvedic science and medicine in Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences. This time, Mukharji plunges …
Andrew Brandel has organized an extraordinary and diverse set of commentaries on Nayanika Mookherjee’s The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Duke University Press, 2015). Each intervention is a path that moves outward from Mookherjee’s remarkable study, finding ways through the brambles of memory and history. We hope you enjoy. — Todd Meyers, …
Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty
by Veena Das
Fordham University Press, 2014. 255 pages
In Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham 2014) we listen with Veena Das to ordinary ethics in challenged lives of poverty, illness, and family relations; and in three often conflicting registers of (a) advocacy, (b) moral engagement, and (c) acknowledgement of inherent uncertainties (in the very fabric …
Ian Harper, Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Development at the University of Edinburgh, talks to Alice Street about his book Development and Public Health in the Himalaya: Reflections on Healing in Contemporary Nepal.
AS: Ian, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your history as a medical practitioner, and how you came to work in Nepal.
IH: …