Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the healing practice of a formerly peripatetic South Indian community, called Narikuravar. It describes and illustrates the modes and contents of the healers’ performance and marketing and investigates how these different aesthetic and artistic elements are linked to the therapeutic dialogue.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the healing practice of a formerly peripatetic South Indian community, called Narikuravar. This community looks back on a long tradition of healing and fortunetelling, over the last decades the healing practice has changed due to an altered health geography in India as well as to new market mechanisms. Whereas for centuries the Narikuravar healers operated as wandering mendicants today they treat patients from elaborately decorated healer shops, which are organised in the fashion of a doctor's practice, and they advertise their services through the media, e.g through local TV channels. Even though a considerable number of these healers have started to attend Siddha or Ayurveda courses on the private education market and have further adapted and borrowed elements from other healing practices and traditions, the self-representation of these healers stresses the inherited traditional character of their skills as well as their strong connection to the forces of nature by drawing on images from a romanticised past. These self-representations follow partly a trend of reification of tradition and folklore that can be found all over India, other parts of these performances and advertisement strategies build on classical Tamil concepts of aesthetics, as for example brought forward in the Sangam literature. This paper describes and illustrates the modes and contents of the healers' performance and marketing and investigates how these different aesthetic and artistic elements are linked to the therapeutic dialogue.