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Cultural Growth as a Distributed Process:Coherence, Change and Agency in two Religious Medical Traditions of India
| In my paper, I examine the medical traditions among the Santals, a "tribal society' in middle India, and among a variety of Tulu speaking castes in Karnataka, in South India.Focusing on medical knowledge, I explore the place of indigenous medicine in these two societies, and how such issues on ethnobiological classification , category formation, body images and cosmologies are encoded and transmitted from an healer to another. Contrasting the transmission of knowledge in these two societies, I discuss the role of he agency whereby the body of medical knowledge gets redefined.I also explore how innovations in treatment practices take place, iniiated by healers but also by the patients themselves who take an active part in their reatment.In such processes, health care implies transactions between healer and patient which follow different patterns in boeth societies.
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