by Marissa Kemp
Carleton University professor of Anthropology Kristin Bright has had an interest in India since her first trip to Rajasthan as an undergraduate student in 1989. Since then, she has been studying the social life and history of Islamic medicine in India. One of the most interesting aspects of this tradition, she says, is its largely secular and multi-regional roots. Its cosmopolitan legacy comes from cultural exchange that happened in and around the Middle East, Persia, Northern Africa, and South Asia through trade and scholarly networks, between 900-1600.
She argues that health and medicine do not belong solely to hospitals, though that is where many people will think of development in the medical sector. Instead, she suggests that medicine belongs also to the household where women practice hereditary medicine as tabibas (women practitioners). By combining our understanding of medicine in both the public and private realm, she suggests, we may gain a better understanding of public health in India.
In addition, Bright has been working with colleagues at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) in Cochin, where she is looking at specific features and contingencies of gender and structural inequality in how women access cancer care. This project has been an important challenge in interdisciplinary collaboration, according to Bright, and has opened her eyes and those of her colleagues to the role that anthropology and social science perspectives can play in emerging areas of global health.
Bright and her colleague Shubhada Dhage received a grant to go to Pune last month. Their current focus is on self-employed, service-economy workers and the relationship between gender, social features of earning and saving, and dynamics of decision-making about health. She is interested in the extremely close-knit aspect of kinship and lending practices, historically and culturally, and proposes that this factor calls into question the assumption that micro-finance allows women a new start. Micro-finance is to a large extent predicated on western ideals of agency and success and does not necessarily coincide with the way women relate to one another or to broader conditions of labour.
Bright is working on a book about gender and genealogies of care and knowledge in Islamic medicine. In addition to the initiative in Pune (where Bright and Dhage will be affiliated with University of Pune), Bright is working closely with AIMS (Cochin) as well as Bangalore University and the National Institute of Unani Medicine (Bangalore), giving Carleton connections with many partners in India.