Lexington Books
Pages: 264
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-4985-9423-3 • Hardback • April 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-4985-9424-0 • eBook • April 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
Mary M. Cameron is professor of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University.
Chapter 1: Within the Field: History, Practitioners, and Frameworks
Chapter 2: Dr. Narendra Nath Tiwari, Teacher and Botanist
Chapter 3: Dr. Rishi Ram Koirala, Healer
Chapter 4: Developing Ayurveda
Chapter 5: Dr. Lokendra Man Singh, Surgeon and Visionary Educator
Chapter 6: Gender, Culture, Science, and Ayurvedic Medicine: Five Women Doctors
Cameron focuses on observations and interviews she carried out between 1997 and 2012 with eight Nepali Ayurveda doctors, including five women. She presents Ayurveda (“knowledge of life”) as a plant-based, person-centered, holistic body of theory and practice that interconnects diet, daily routine, lifestyle, social milieu, mental attitude, and environment with bodily, sensorial, mental, and spiritual health. According to one of the interviewees, “plants can heal humans because both are microcosms of the same biosocial world." The “three fruits” of the title refer to a common Ayurvedic preparation, made from three varieties of trees that grow in Nepal, widely used for digestive problems and as a strengthening tonic. Cameron emphasizes that Ayurveda is accessible to ordinary people in Nepal, and according to the World Health Organization, “75 percent of the population use traditional medicine, mainly that based upon the Ayurvedic system." Ironically, political and economic threats to Ayurveda from supporters of allopathic medicine have enhanced the opportunity of women to engage in professional medicine within Ayurvedic institutions. In addition the conservation of medicinal plants is a valuable bridge between the interests of so-called “traditional” medicine and the environmental consciousness and well-being of modern society.Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.— Choice Reviews
Cameron’s analytic eye is brilliant as reading Three fruits was both painful and hilarious as she picked up experiences that trap Ayurveda in twilight between life and death and empowerment and depowerment. The marvelous attention to both emotion and logic is the vital sign of this scholarly ethnography. The book is very revealing of Nepal, Ayurveda and its doctors alike that it returns me again and again to think about the politics around health care. . . This book would be of interest to health activists, health practitioners, researchers and students of social sciences.
— Anthropology Book Forum
Three Fruits is a magnificent study of Ayurveda as a vibrant intellectual and therapeutic tradition at a critical historical moment. The ethnographic core is a brilliantly crafted depiction of practitioners in their social and political working environments. This sequence of insider views generates a great sensibility towards the system of knowledge about human-environmental vital dependencies in the terms of real characters, whose careers of healing are faithfully brought to life. The book contains furthermore an astute assessment of the contemporary value of ayurvedic knowledge in appreciating the need to protect globally biodiverse ecologies as cultural landscapes, with potential at the same time to contribute towards an equitable, just, and affordable plural public health care system. Three Fruits will multiply the numbers of readers who already know Mary Cameron to be an exceptional observer of social change in Nepal, with a keen activist’s interest in making a shared tradition find its voice to influence that change for the better.”— Ben Campbell, University of Durham
“Three Fruits is a significant contribution to anthropological studies of Ayurveda in South Asia. Drawing on decades of research, Mary Cameron tells a compelling story of how practitioners of traditional healing adapted to a medical system that was predicated on modern medicine pushed by the state. The book is as much about the political economy of Ayurveda as it is about Ayurveda as a cultural system. Told through a series of biographies of ayurvedic practitioners, Cameron’s narrative illuminates the challenges faced by resource-poor societies in the global south as they strive to reconcile traditional forms of knowledge with their commitment to modernization.” — Arjun Guneratne, Macalester College