Ayurveda in the Age of Biomedicine: Discursive Asymmetries and Counter-Strategies.

Since the beginning of the British colonial enterprise in India the representation of the relationship between Western biomedicine and Ayurveda has been based on a fundamental epistemological asymmetry. However much Ayurveda was represented in Orientalist literature as accurate, poetic, useful, scholarly, or interesting, it could never occupy with authority the privileged place of the scientific that was central to the rhetoric of colonial rationality. In postcolonial India the practice of Ayurveda, its textual and intellectual production, socialization, treatment, public health education, scientific debate, research, and pharmaceutical commerce, all take place in the shadow of this biomedical hegemony. This dissertation analyzes the historical contingencies of this asymmetry, its instantiation in the discursive practices of contemporary Ayurveda practitioners, and the counter-strategies developed and deployed in the context of Ayurveda’s scientific modernization and institutionalization. First, I describe the textual codification of this asymmetrical disciplinary alignment in the genre of British colonial compendia of materia medica, and the efforts of anti-colonial apologists to regiment the two disciplines as separate yet equal approaches to a unified human body, an ideology which I call medical parallelism. Next, I describe the social effects of this ideology at Ayurveda institutions in Kerala, focusing in particular on how Ayurveda’s disciplinary boundaries are organized by practices of pedagogy, displays of expertise, and scientific debate. Lastly, I describe the current transformations of Ayurveda’s disciplinary boundaries through the commodification and globalization of Ayurveda drugs. My analysis throughout the dissertation focuses on the production, ideologization, and institutionalization of discursive action, which I argue, effect the stabilization of the function of linguistic reference as a medium of ideological signs. This stabilization of ideological reference, I argue, is a semiotic condition of the macro-historical processes of Ayurveda’s modernization, institutionalization, and commodification. Thus, this dissertation demonstrates an approach to history that centers on the discourse-pragmatic underpinnings of large-scale social change. In the conclusion of this dissertation I address this discourse-pragmatic analysis of Ayurveda’s postcolonial history to the challenge of formulating a critical discourse of modernity that can account for the diversity of the kinds of experiences and historical processes often glossed as “modernization.”Ph.D.AnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64594/1/wolfgram_1.pd

Conducting Community Based Participatory Action Research

Organizations are continuously changing based on social, political, and economic conditions. HRD scholars and practitioners should think about new approaches to how they can engage with organizations and the people within them. Action research has been used as an approach in organization development for many years. While conventional action research has an emphasis on classical or traditional processes of inquiry, we present Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) as new research approach with an additional level of critical thought and engagement that is in alignment with Critical HRD. CBPAR aims to create knowledge and action, but also aims to empower members of communities or organization who are marginalized or oppressed. CBPAR offers an exciting and alterative approach to organizational research

The Terminal Woodland: examining late occupation on mound D at Toltec Mounds (3LN42), Central Arkansas

The Toltec Mounds site (3LN42) (A.D. 700-1050) in central Arkansas has intrigued archaeologists for decades. Although it dates well within the Woodland Period and has many features characteristic of a Woodland Period site, including grog-tempered pottery and a reliance on hunting and gathering, its mound-and-plaza layout is an architectural design suggestive of the later Mississippi Period (A.D. 1000-1500). This confusion is addressed in this thesis by examining two ceramic assemblages from different building stages of Mound D, the last mound to be altered at the site. The ceramics show an affiliation with northeastern Arkansas that has been underemphasized in the past, and that may provide more information on Toltec's relationships with its neighbors through the end of the Woodland Period. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Ceramics and the political economy of Moundville: a compositional study using Neutron Activation Analysis

Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) is used to determine the chemical composition of 80 stylistically local and nonlocal ceramics recovered from the Mississippian civic-ceremonial center of Moundville in west-central Alabama. The chemical data derived from NAA is compared to a previously analyzed ceramic chemical database produced for the Mississippian Southeast in order to: (i) independently confirm if pottery specimens are locally made or imports; (ii) evaluate the accuracy of traditional sourcing of pottery by style techniques as compared to NAA sourcing; and (iii) identify the sources of pottery, allowing for the mapping of the spatial extent of Moundville's trade and interaction network. These results are then used to critique our current model of Moundville's political economy, especially as it relates to the use of prestige goods as an ideological source of elite authority. The analysis demonstrates that NAA can successfully differentiate between locally produced and nonlocal pottery. NAA generally confirms the accuracy of stylistic analyses in identifying the foreign nature of archaeological ceramics, but the results also indicate the need for chemical compositional analysis in order to fully and accurately map the distribution and production sources of prehistoric ceramics at Moundville. Confirmation of nonlocal trade in ceramics leads to the conclusion that elites at Moundville maintained links with distant populations, providing some evidence to support the efficacy of the prestige goods model in describing the establishment and legitimization of chiefly power in the Mississippian world. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries