Join us for the Canada-India Centre Faculty Series

Speaker: Professor Kristen Bright, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University
Topic: Islamic Modern: Enactments of Worldliness and Value in Unani-Tibb

Date: Tuesday March 31, 2015
Time: 3:30 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Location: River Building 1401 (Canada-India Centre Boardroom) – same floor at Tim Hortons
RSVP: india@carleton.ca (limited seating)

Abstract: Nationalist campaigns in early twentieth century India sought both a homegrown alternative to imposed British practices and full participation in the modern world. Among the outcomes was the positioning of Unani-Tibb (Greco-Islamic medicine) as an expression of Islamic modernity. Household clinics, state laboratories, and educational institutions were organized as sites for the constitution of systems capable of dispensing health. What were the novel forms of authority, heritage, piety, and populism that emerged in such a context? This talk brings us up to the present to think about Islamic modernity in contemporary South Asia as the instantiation of particular instruments and ideas about legitimacy and value (the gendering of hereditary and clinical knowledges for example) as well as the animation of particular histories in the present. What emerges is a politics of care in which the state relies on traditional knowledge systems to support its appearance as uniquely plural when it comes to science. Drawing from ethnographic and biographical analysis in this presentation, Dr. Bright will comment on the multiple regimes of worldliness and value that surround and structure the practice of medicine in India today.

For further information contact Gopika.solanki@carleton.ca (Dept. of Political Science) or Richard.mann@carleton.ca (Dept. of Religion)

The CICE Faculty Series showcases scholarly research of faculty involved in Canada-India studies to the university community and provides a platform for academic discourse. Supported by the Office of the Vice-President, Research & International.