First promoted in India as part of M.K. Gandhi’s anti-colonial project, nature cure (prakriti jeevanam) draws on the metaphor of vitality to frame the body as having a natural wisdom—a vital force—that works to restore health and balance. Through mentorships with non-professionalized healers, chronically ill patients in Kerala, south India learn to become ‘self-doctors,’ to repair their ill bodies, revitalize the toxic environment, and respond to moral collapse.
In this talk, I begin by highlighting how naturopathic narratives of vitality and toxicity intersect with broader regional concerns of environmental degradation. From there, I ethnographically chart the moral quests of two chronically ill persons, who each find that their bodies have become exposed to toxins. Instead of aiming to simply limit their exposure or detoxify what has accumulated, they undertake naturopathic self-care practices that establish healthy immunities and environmental attachments for all. In doing so, they each renounce their religious backgrounds, in identification with a more ecumenical mode of living, centered on environmental stewardship.
As these nature cure practitioners conjure vital energies into the here-and-now of illness management, I demonstrate how they collectivize self-care, reconfiguring the potential of their bodies to heal themselves and the planetary relations around them. At the same time, I demonstrate how despite their aim for transcendence through an alternative eco-politics, structural barriers remain.
Speaker's Bio:
Victoria Sheldon is a medical anthropologist with a focus on alternative health movements and personhood in Kerala, south India. She recently defended her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in South Asian Studies. Her research offers a semi-person-centered analysis of nature cure (prakriti jeevanam) caregiving and environmental activism in Kerala, South India.
Victoria has published in Society and Culture in South Asia (2020) and Asian Medicine (2020), and has co-published an article on Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine) in Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2019). Victoria is also the Anthropology News Contributing Co-Editor for the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA).
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