5.2 Responsibility and Ayurveda as an Example of Alternative
5.2.6 Ayurveda and the Limits of Alternatives
There is a large difference between symbiotic coexistence, or to borrow Ingold’s term, correspondence and controlled coexistence based on the imperative of normative well-being of just one part of this entanglement.
be organic wholes, therefore, does not mean to be free but indebted to the old world, structured by divisions and dichotomies. The cyborg is made from parts that are not necessarily reconciled in the bigger coherent autonomous whole, and yet, it successfully exists in acceptance. This hybridity is represented in the Ayurvedic ideal of co-dependent living in an ecosystem, but also in the practice of iterative tinkering, when different “alternatives” are combined to heal a person (see chapter 5.1.2, 135-136).
But only in vulnerability, in a process of letting oneself go, in the moment of losing control, the moment that a change in life is happening. This happening of life is correspondence, conditioned by response-ability. Because (responsible) lives are not lived in (intentional) interaction but in correspondence (Ingold 2016). This coming together is not about bringing together several separated entities to form a totality but about carrying on together, even just for a short period (ibid.).
“And just as undergoing always overflows doing, so the production of life always exceeds the finalities of consumption.” (ibid., 23)
6 Conclusions
Dona Haraway´s cyborg, an entity that resists purification and embraces its own hybridity, is much more resilient for survival than the modernist purified one. (Haraway 1991) At the same time, the modern endeavour of purification has never been successful: in the words of Bruno Latour (1993), ‘we have never been modern’, although we have certainly created and dominated an era of environmental and other harm (cf. Crutzen 2006). Thirty years since the social sciences first acknowledged that hybridity and interdependence are the basis of (sustainable) existence, we are still facing the “consequences of modernity” (Giddens, 1990), primarily by watching the planet we inhabit being destroyed by the consequences of modernity, by the materialization of the ontological separation of us and them, cultural and natural, human and non-human, by violently fulfilling this imagined dichotomous politics of normativity (Law et al. 2014). The same scholars in social sciences and philosophy, influencing many others on the way, have helped mainstream an emphasis on finally stepping away from the modernist ways of living and occupying the planet. They reiterate that only through realization of our dependency on the natural environment, can humanity survive. (cf. Latour 2018)
Now more than at any other previous time in history, people are aware of this danger, which is no longer “just” a threat, but a nightmare coming true. As Ulrich Beck (1992) argued already more than thirty years ago, that systematic risk management is characteristic for contemporary form of modernity. The combination the so-called migrant crisis unfolding in Europe since 2015, global pandemic of COVID 19, and different wars within and beyond the Global North over the last decade, has made insecurity an everyday experience of those living in the wealthy part of the world. The search for appealing alternatives to modernity is becoming expressed through unexpected objects of consumer demand, especially in the domain of wellbeing. It manifests in the popularity of the New Age phenomenon (Heelas and Woodhead 2005), the so- called (spiritual) seekership (cf. Warrier 2008) and the rise of nonconventional medicine and healing practices (Siahpush 1998; Coulter and Willis 2004). Contemporary subjectivity is characterized by the individual turn from modernist governmentality materialized in disciplinary institutions monopolizing expert knowledge (such as the clinic), towards more self- sufficient late- or postmodern reflexive ways of managing personal wellbeing. (cf. Foucault 2008)
Trough an ethnographic study of Ayurveda, this thesis has introduced one of the ways that individuals deal with insecurities. The reflexive individual governed via self-management without disposing of actual tools to make an informed decision, lacks a cohesive framework of how to live their life. (Lūse and Lázár 2007, 2) Ayurveda provides access to holistic and individualized approach to wellbeing. This access is granted via knowledge conditioned by ontological proximity of all being. Since according to Ayurveda everything and everyone consists of the same five elements just in different proportion, it enables an individual to understand and therefore act upon one´s body.
Making use of Foucault and Butler´s approach to understanding power and subject formation, I looked at how this potential alternative to modernist wellbeing works in practice. Through the case of Ayurveda in Czech Republic, I examine how it is discursively established, individually mastered and negotiated with existent modes of relating to oneself and to the world. I approach
it as a case of an alternative to modern forms of life and self-management that functions within contemporary social environment.
In Ayurvedic schools the specific discourse of body, overlapping with self, is constructed by the negotiation between the students of Ayurvedic practice and schools´ authorities, disposed with different types of cultural capital, legitimizing this version of wellbeing. The legitimization is accomplished through establishing continuities within existent forms of responsible self- management, as well as past local practices covered under imagined “folk medicines”.
Moreover, Ayurveda is in this process also distinguished from the practices understood as incompatible with the new forms of individualized self-care. In other words, it is legitimized through establishing discontinuities with the dominant biomedical health care practice (in the Czech case still provided by the public health care system). A link is also made to the orientalised (Said 1978) idea of “natural” mode of self-health care practices in ancient India, but also to this practice as still embodied within contemporary Indian society.
While the body is in modernity institutionalized from outside – by the establishment of expert domain of science about the man, and practiced this way by its application in form of clinical biomedicine –, in Ayurveda it becomes institutionalized from inside: through practice of knowing one´s body. This knowing is achieved by the body’s inner interconnecting, as well as by establishing its specific embeddedness within surrounding environment.
This way the capacity to know is returned to the living body (Bates 1995, 20). Moreover, the mechanism of interconnecting the body inwards and outwards thus creates the recognition of embodied subject. Next to this process of subjectification – recognition as an active body participating within the interrelated and interdependent ecosystem – certain objectification of body determines the agency of this subject. In this way, Ayurveda introduces a classical disciplinary mechanism, based on the principle of subject objectification and objects subjectification. (Foucault 1984, 197) To put it differently, to really know the body, to know oneself, one needs to detach from own experience of suffering and the desire to be well. In this thesis, I consider these two interconnected processes, principles of discipline creating a different regime of domination, as key in alternative body becoming.
This way the agency of the body – to know it and to be capable to manipulate it towards wellbeing – makes the body independent of the dominant health discourse and healthcare practice. Nevertheless, this independence achieved by empowerment simultaneously produces a different sort of dependence. The body becomes dependent on the surrounding environment.
Treated as a process and product of the whole ecosystem it inhabits, which is changing through time, to remain well one needs to continuously monitor and consequently discipline oneself to keep up with the changing inner and outer environment. This is achieved through the use of certain techniques of the self.
In Ayurveda, body becomes not just a tool for knowing of what has been previously perceived as other (entities and environment the body interacts with), but also of oneself. This way the capacity to know and handle the body towards (maintaining or accomplishing) wellbeing is created via a kind of articulation (Latour 2004) mirrored in increasing responsibilisation of the individual, because knowledge means power (Foucault 1980). Body in Ayurvedic practice thus becomes a part of the ecosystem. The more one is driven by the imperative of self-care, the
more one is not content with just knowing, and the more difficult it becomes to achieve wellbeing. The more one posits herself at the centre of the ecosystem, turning attention towards herself, the more vulnerable the body seems to become.
Generally speaking, while the 18th- and 19th-century disciplinary mechanisms worked on the principle of dissociating power from the body (Foucault 1995, 138) , the self-governed individuals now seek to subjugate the body through her newly embodied knowledge. When one knows the body and how to make it feel well, the self-care imperative prominent in late modern society assumes clear moral meaning.
Through Ayurvedic practice, framed by specific discourse of the body and wellbeing underlined by individualism and holism, the individual body becomes its own norm: what is normal is determined by the individual “natural” constitution. Consequently, this means that there are no universal reference points to navigate individual wellbeing, which practically demands the continuous adjusting, tinkering between appropriate self-care practices (Mol, Moser and Pols 2015). This lack of universal framework in connection to the maximalization of individual responsibility may in practice produce an almost unattainable ideal of self-management.
I therefore argue that even though Ayurveda offers a possible alternative to modernity in terms of body and self-becoming in correspondence with surrounding socio-natural environment (cf.
Ingold 2016), one’s access to knowing one’s body and therefore an emerging agency to manipulate it put such an individual under an imperative of reflexive self-management in the centre of one’s ecosystem. In this situation, the equal agency of all entities participating is compromised by the hierarchical structure of a human domination. Ayurvedic practice becomes in the end an ultimate and very efficient tool for modernist organization of world-making. By the imagined co-dependence and equal agency of all entities it makes in consequence a method for self and world categorization, separation and potential conquering into a smallest detail. In theory, this established a co-dependence of a human body and self with their ecosystem. In theory this dependence, I argue, might also make every single entity in the ecosystem stable.
When nevertheless perceiving this dependence as a method of navigating wellbeing, by continuous defending ourselves from changes within and outside of the body, we do not connect or correspond, but separate oneself from the ecosystem. In consequence, it is exactly this separation, this hybridity resistance, what weakens such individual. Until some kind of alternative to modernity, or some mode of embracing hybridity embracing becomes actually institutionalizes within the system, the survival of such a different mode of ordering reality (Law et al. 2014) will be difficult.
We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life.
—Haraway (1988, 580)
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