Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how doctor-activists and their patients in ‘nature cure’ (prakriti jeevanam) camps in Kerala, south India reimagine being ‘prakriti’ or natural in ethical opposition to the region’s modern toxins: processed foods, vaccinations, and pesticide-based environmental pollution.

Paper long abstract:

While tourist companies celebrate Kerala as "God's Own Country", citizens are becoming increasingly suspicious regarding environmental toxicity and medical authority in this lush south Indian state. Resulting from rapid development since the 1970s, Kerala's emergent middle class have witnessed a shocking increase in lifestyle diseases, dangerous pesticide uses, and severe water pollution. Through education-based activist gatherings and social media, patients aim to transform into liberated self-doctors, who are also activists in opposition to Kerala's modern toxins: processed foods, vaccinations, and pesticide-based environmental pollution. Based upon examining the discourses and lives of three camp organizers, I will explore how within residential nature cure (prakriti jeevanam) camps held throughout the region, participants are invited to reimagine 'Western' lifestyle illnesses and habits as 'scientifically' manageable through raw food diets, natural 'eco-therapy' farming, and group meditations that 'detoxify' their immunity or 'vital power' (jeevashakti) from modern social and environmental illnesses. Through analysis of participant and media narratives of detoxification that draw on Gandhian and 'secular Buddhist' virtues of self-rule (swaraj) and nonviolence (ahimsa), I will trace how participants reimagine the virtue of being 'prakriti' or natural in ethical opposition to three 'outside' regional developments: processed food, vaccinations, and pesticides. For the largely middle-class, urban participants, these reorientations facilitate a larger questioning of normative understandings of scientific and religious knowledge, and posit a new understanding of the body-environment relationship that is connected to a larger ethical critique of the consumer market economy and associated aspirations of affluence and mobility.