The Main Tenets and Limits of Becoming Bodies through Ayurveda

on her well-being. If she cannot or will not change the situation, the difficulty persists. As the last passage implies, despite knowing the body, it is impossible for Ladislav to manipulate it.

Here, environmental factors override the body’s agency, making it impossible to control it, to empower oneself or any other positively perceived effect of Ayurveda. We, therefore, arrive to a place where the agency of other entities acting upon one’s body is greater than one’s own agency, than one’s own ability to solve the problem. This situation may then inhibit self- mastery.

Awareness of the body in Ayurvedic practice, that is, awareness of its internal interconnectedness and interdependence with the external environment, does not, therefore, automatically imply knowing the bodily dis-ease experienced—precisely because it is dependent on so many factors. At the same time, the body-centrist approach adopted often produces a sense of primacy concerning one's agency and, thus, the potential to solve almost any bodily problem, contrary to the discourse implying equal agency among all actors bound to the interdependency of a specific situation. Here a parallel is offered to the conquest-like narrative of Western science about the subjugation of nature. Still, even Ayurvedic theory need not overlap with empirical reality. If one fails to address dis-ease successfully, such a situation may produce unpleasant feelings. For example, when considering all the different options, Dana often cannot recognize the origin of her bodily struggles or the strategy for solving them. At the same time, she feels that she could, as she has potential access to all the relevant information and knowledge. The auto-ethnographic notes illustrate more extremely that this situation can cause anxiety about one's misconduct. Nevertheless, if, on the other hand, the individual does not gain a sense of primacy of his own agency but is convinced his body is in an interdependent relationship with an almost infinite number of other existences, responsibility for himself among these existences may become completely diluted.

interdependence of body parts and the body and the surrounding entities with which it interacts.

As a result, the body-mind system becomes much more complex but, at the same time, its boundaries become eroded. It becomes dependent on a multitude of internal and external influences. Thus, recognition of the body's interconnectedness also causes an increase in the agency of all interconnected things. The body, mind, food, close people, weather, etcetera become acting subjects with whom one has to agree, know, adapt to or somehow manipulate in order not to aggravate the existing bodily state. Since it is not only a matter of transforming the understanding of the body, but the perception of the body, the transformation of the experience of the body and, consequently transformation of the handling of the body itself—the transformation of its creation—practitioners are thus transforming their bodies into Ayurvedic bodies.

Knowing here refers to the employment of holistic and individualist Ayurvedic epistemology stemming from the ontology-organizing bodies and world in general in one interdependent ontological unity. This reframes the practitioners' categorization of the body and world, creating new norms. At the same time, knowing is conditioned by the objectification of the object of enquiry, that is, one cannot be personally attached to healing dis-ease to understand how. This introduces quite a limit to knowing, for neoliberal subjectivity. At the same time, knowing is also framed as a specific bodily experience, making the body an ultimate methodological instrument. Thus, the biomedical epistemology the research participants have been socialized into is persuasive because it has been institutionalized from outside (i.e., in a top-down way), and, at the same time, it restricts any deeper understanding of how most dis-eases emerge and how to treat them. However, in Ayurveda, the epistemology and, therefore, the knowing need to be institutionalized from inside. The authority for such knowing is bestowed through one's own experience; thus, it is kind of unstable, but it also suggests the institutionalization of individualized norms, of one's own particularity. This different epistemology is finally established through discontinuities regarding the dominant one, but also the continuities. These introduce the objectification of body, a certain dis-attachment from the object of our focus as a condition of knowing it, but a dis-attachment that is also challenged by the overlap of the knower and known—the object and subject of knowing as well as the object and subject of the dis-ease origin.

The Ayurvedic way of life can be very demanding in terms of considering all the factors which, according to its theory, influence the functioning of your body, as, for example, diet does. The correctness of diet, as regards its composition and amount, depends on body constitution, the time of day and year, momentary state. Moreover, it also entails monitoring oneself, a kind of ex-post confirmation of the rightness of conduct where one cycle's through what has been eaten, drunk, or done in general that would have caused the problem. Finally, these two things—the prevention/monitoring of self and environment in the sense of their fit and the recognition of past conduct resulting in a bodily manifestation of experienced disharmony—form an excellent basis for a body-mind technique (or techniques of the self) for disciplining one's own behaviour towards avoiding fluctuations in well-being.

Put differently, knowing is fixed but also underpins everyday practice, including the spatiotemporal bodily regime, the balance of one's natural constitution and the changing qualities of the biosocial environment. The hypothetical assumption of understanding and,

therefore, the ability to solve any kind of dis-ease nevertheless creates a strong moral imperative, especially for rather reflexive people. When the norm is individual, and the related, adequate treatment is ever-changing according to time and space, it can be incredibly difficult for people living in a society where this ontology and epistemology is not institutionalized, where other social institutions do not follow it. The new, much stronger imperative of self-care can, therefore, be interpreted as a narrowing of existing norms, which, at the same time, have no referential point except individual experience, no objective authority mechanism.

Since Ayurveda says that holistic bodies (or better, systems of bodies and minds) are individual, everyone comes to know (their body, themselves, other things, and the environment) slightly differently (cf. Nissen 2013, 79). I have defined recognition as the pivotal moment in the process of knowing, that is, the recognition of one’s own previously unintelligible difficulties or feelings (Sointu 2006, 507-509). It is the moment of recognition, the specific clarification of the previously unintelligible, that is crucial here for practitioners to stay with Ayurveda.

Following Latour (2004), Mol and Law (2004), I then shift the concept of recognition from

“merely” knowing medicine and seeing through the lens of medicine to a transformation of thinking and experiencing and practising one's own body. Thus, I observe how the bodies of Ayurvedic practitioners are newly made. Using the concept of linking (Grünenberg et al. 2013), I then discuss the specific effects of knowing that relate to ways of doing the body. This, in contrast to the CAM literature, does not define the interrelation of two bodies or individuals, but rather the interrelation of different parts of the body and mind system with the environment.

I thus combine studies dealing with the effects of CAM on its users with theories about the body put forward by science and technology studies (STS) authors in order to show, using Ayurveda as an example, how new bodies are created through the interconnection of different things (cf.

Grünenberg et al. 2013, 99).

In the process of making Ayurvedic bodies, there is a transformation of the perception, experience and reproduction of the body and the environment. It is not only happening in a different way but in different compositions. What the body looks like, how it functions, what it is connected to and what affects it is rearranged into new relationships. The key point is that a certain “body-centrism” is both the stimulus and the product of the whole described process.

Although body-connecting involves a transformation of self-concept, the treatment of one’s own mind and the environment, the body itself is at its centre. The body is the main object of the practitioners’ attention, the main indicator of whether something is amiss; at the same time, it is also, in a sense, an object that is easier to read and discipline than the mind. And it is exactly the tension between the Ayurvedic doctrine of holism, assuming an equal agency of all entities, and this body-centrism which can make becoming Ayurveda, that is, holistic and individualized bodies, a rather agonizing passage (Moser and Law, 1999). However, is not this extreme and detailed responsibilization exactly the thing which restricts this existence?

Contextualizing it back to the local Western/Czech environment, the concept of holism regarding a specific approach to person (e.g., through holistic medicine) is rather popular today.

It has become an excellent countercultural brand and slogan opposing the hegemony of Western medicine. This approach, though, has a long tradition in our culture. In the roots of European civilization, we find the concept of Kalokagathia, introducing the connection between mental and physical beauty. Among more contemporary traditional variations, the institution of the

Sokol⁹², for example, links the same areas of the human being, albeit explicitly in relation to health, with its motto “a strong mind in a sound body”. Today’s holistic medicine trend or

“holistic movement” in the West emphasizes the interconnectedness of separately perceived parts of the human being (e.g., organs) in biomedicine, as well as its dependence on the surrounding natural and socioeconomic environment. Above, I therefore discuss a phenomenon that is almost notorious and about which most people, both experts and laypeople, likely have some opinion. Perhaps then, there is no analysis in the literature of what such holism looks like in the everyday practice of people who try to live by this idea.

92 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokol

5 Im/possibilities of a Well-Being

“One cannot really live the belief associated with profoundly different conditions of existence, that is, with other games and other stakes ... . Those who want to believe with the beliefs of others grasp neither the objective truth nor the subjective experience of belief,” claims Bourdieu (1992, 68). He draws here upon an idea that one cannot simply rationally decide to do something because: “practical belief is not a ‘state of mind’, still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body” (ibid.).

Building upon Bourdieu’s point, this last chapter discusses this exact principle as regards the potential of and limits to the practice and becoming of alternative bodies. Drawing upon the analysis of good and “bad passages” (Moser and Law 1999) towards the Ayurvedic well-being and living introduces here an analytical category regarding practitioners´ experiences reflections as well as a much more abstract discussion of being/ living well with respect to (the natural) environment.