Abstrakt
Over the last decades, post-socialist societies are facing the decrease of trust in western medicine accompanied by the increase of accessibility to a huge amount of "alternative" "medical" knowledge and practices. How resilient are people living in these societies in relation to their health maintenance? Building upon 4-years long ethnographic research of Ayurveda (one of the T&CM modalities) in the Czech Republic I look at ways of translating this specific knowledge into everyday practice.
The core field-site consisted of two schools of Ayurveda, from where I have followed the ways (in which the) students have accommodated these new ideas about body and health in their lives. While the original reason for starting the study was for most of them to handle or avoid the sickness themselves or their close ones have suffered from, the Ayurveda study produces much larger changes.
They are not (only) learning, how to handle the vulnerability of the body, but negotiating the level of adaptation to very different ideas about its functioning. These encompass not solely the body, but the mind and social world too.
As a result, the new ways of understanding and practicing the body and subjectivity, are being negotiated. These negotiations lie in a centre of my analysis.
In my paper, I explore the resilience of Ayurveda practitioners in their health-maintenance, while I concentrate on different types of body and mind vulnerabilities secured but also produced in this process.