Open Access Edition of The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India by Anthony Cerulli

FAIN: DR-280135-21

University of California Press Foundation (Oakland, CA 94612-3764)
Archna Patel (Project Director: December 2020 to July 2022)
Kim Robinson (Project Director: July 2022 to September 2022)
Kim Robinson (Project Director: September 2022 to September 2022)
Erich van Rijn (Project Director: September 2022 to October 2022)

This project will publish the book The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India, written by NEH Fellow Anthony Cerulli (NEH grant number Fb-56351-12) in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access book.

Associated Products

The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Title: The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India
Year: 2022
Publisher: University of California Press
Author: Anthony Cerulli
Abstract: The Practice of Texts examines the uses of the Sanskrit medical classics in two educational institutions of India’s classical life science, Ayurveda: the college and the gurukula. In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurvedic physicians understand and use the Sanskrit classics in their professional work today. His fieldwork in south India illuminates the nature of philology and ritual in the ayurvedic gurukula and showcases how knowledge is exchanged among students, teachers, and patients. The result, Cerulli shows, is that the Sanskrit classics are presented and applied differently in the college and gurukula, producing a variety of relationships with these texts among practitioners. By interrogating the politics surrounding the place of the Sanskrit classics in ayurvedic curricula, this book reveals a spectrum of views about the history and tradition of Ayurveda in modern India.
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.120
Primary URL Description: University of California Press, Luminos
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/52898
Secondary URL Description: OAPEN

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