University of Heidelberg

Research Area C focuses on the transfer between Asia and Europe of practices concerning, institutions for, ideas about, and perceptions of health and environment. Practice is the privileged point of access in this Research Area because the processes underlying both health and environment are juxtaposed here with the often pressing need to find a working solution. These observations give plausibility to a hypothesis about the dynamics underlying the massive transfer, exchange, and adaptation of medical and environmental practices and their accompanying concepts and institutions between Asia and Europe.

The exchange of health knowledge between Asia and Europe has been described as extremely asymmetrical: “the West” gave the concepts, institutions and practices of individual and public health with biomedicine at the centre, while “the rest” (including Asia) received. This description and its underlying paradigm have suffered unforeseen complications in recent decades. These have been the result of a cultural revolt among patients in the “West” that led to a strong validation of alternative “Asian” medicines, which in turn had a major impact on their standing in East and South Asia. Even within this circular flow, however, the old asymmetry prevails for the time being because the revalidation of Asian medicines was prompted by patients in the West. At the same time, recent studies in the history of medicine and public health have brought to light the ways in which medical practitioners in Asia and Europe have merged different medical practices of different origins and claims to efficacy in their effort to achieve results. These developments highlight a number of challenges that will also be found in earlier transcultural flows of health and environment related features.

The first among them is the dynamics of the ongoing relationship between the concepts, institutions and practices of health and environment that have resulted from a local reconfiguration of imported elements and the evolving forms and other reconfigurations of these elements. An inoculation campaign with the same vaccine in Britain, the Punjab, or Heilongjiang might involve utterly different political, social, and cultural processes and conflicts that again differ over time. A European meditative practice from Japan, that itself has been reconfigured in a long migration eastward through Asia is reconfigured to help overcome symptoms of stress in modern urban life, and it might flow back to Japan in this new but seemingly authentic guise. The resulting “multiple modernities” are best understood as particular configurations of this increasingly global cultural flow.

The second challenge is the question of agency. Against an assumed authority by the modern state in setting and enforcing standards and of the biomedical or environmental establishment in deciding individual and collective health and environmental trajectories, patients and collectivities, often joined by professionals, set their own agenda based on their own standards such as effectiveness, religious norms, cost, or long-term viability. In the process, they may become independent agents pulling or pushing cultural flow whose legitimacy is as much contested as they challenge the authority of the powers that be. The result is a complex process of great historical impact that on all sides continuously interacts with global elements, the understanding of which has been hampered by agenda-driven efforts at streamlining both the historical narrative, and the practical consequences to be derived from it.

A third challenge has to do with practices, their very loose relationship to concepts and institutions with their often normative framework, and their capacity to tolerate the simultaneous presence of elements that on a higher level of abstraction might seem incompatible. Bourdieu and Taylor have made important forays in this field. The challenge here is one of sources – the written record on such practices even for members of the elites is very scant –, the methodology of an analysis – their diffuseness, silent incorporation of elements taken from elsewhere, and non-conceptualised layer of consistency –, and one of integration – a simple subsumption under normative categories would bury the creativity and vitality of often subaltern actors in creating new livable options that defy old and often predate a new categorical universe.

Research Area C therefore focuses on transformations of healing systems between Europe and Asia concerning knowledge (medical theories, university curricula), objects like drugs and medicinal plants and hospital equipment, people (doctors, patients, tourists, immigrants), institutions (hospitals, medical schools, yoga schools), and much more besides. But perhaps most importantly, what are being exchanged and transformed are practices (of healing, administration, meditation, tourism, manufacture, etc.). The language of practice theory allows us to speak of the exchange and transfer of knowledge, people, institutions, and much else as well, within the bounds of a single paradigm. The term “practice” itself is meant to overcome a number of dichotomies that have plagued the social and human sciences for a long time, especially the dichotomies individual/social and subjective/ objective. When we speak of healing systems in Europe and Asia, we are really speaking of networks of practices – and as Bourdieu has shown, practices involve both persons and objects (e.g. smuggling heroin, teaching a student how to run an X-ray machine, learning how to prepare Ayurvedic medications).

Concepts, institutions, and practices relating to the environment connect different debates in all Research Areas, since environment is not a synonym to nature, but includes both, the cultural imaginary and the relationship between people and their biophysical environment. In the different stages of ecological and environmental thought, Asian perceptions have been transformed under the impact of Western features to the point of feeding in to the imaginaire of an originally better and more primordial stage versus deterioration by population explosion and dangerous diseases that threaten world health. Together with the introduction of new plants, animals, and energy resources in Asia as well as the spread of modern industrial practices, notions such as evolution, ecological system or green GDP, regulatory regimes, forms of civic activism, and romantic ideas of untouched nature have made their way into Asian societies in an asymmetrical flow that in itself already had absorbed many Asian features. The Cluster will be able to explore the local reconfigurations of these features through an analysis of a wide range of related elements, ranging from Asian behavioral routines to philosophical reflections on the “natural” order of things (Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy, 1994). In addition, ecology, and environmental paradigms are powerful tools to challenge and change the modernization trajectory chosen by the local elite: As in the West, Asian environmentalism often is a form of resistance not limited to the protection of nature (A. Kalland, G. Persoon, Environmental Movements in Asia, 1998). With its distinctive involvement of women and a wide range of non-governmental actors environmental activism offers access to global and local attention through well-organised transnational networks. Moreover, ecology and environment are innovative topics with interdisciplinary potential in anthropological research (Paul E. Little, “Environments and Environmentalism in Anthropological Research”, in: Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 28, 1999, 253–284).