Contribution short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research of alternative medicine practice in the Czech Republic I look at how people deal with the incommensurability between Ayurveda ideas of living a healthy and happy life and the everyday reality of the social fields (family, work) they are used to function within.

Contribution long abstract:

Based on the four years long ethnographic research among Ayurveda students and practitioners in the Czech Republic I look at how people deal with the incommensurability between Ayurveda ideas of living a healthy and happy life and the everyday reality of the social fields they are used to and ought to function within.

Ayurveda practitioners in my research were often experiencing enormous clashes emerging from the situations created by the difficulties to accommodate newly defined ideas of how the healthy and happy life should be maintained with the kinds of family, work, and leisure life they were used to live before the got to study of Ayurveda. These clashes often subsequently produced fatal changes in their lives as the establishment of the different vocation, divorce/ finding a new partner, abandonment of the previous biomedical care for their illnesses, or a total change of the hobbies or friends circles and activities of spending time together with their close ones.

In my paper, I look at how people handle the limited commensurability among the ideal Ayurveda life encompassing living across social fields, all governed by the rule of self-sustaining based on the assumption of profound interconnection and interdependence between their being and the bio-social environment around and the real world obligations given by their functioning in the neoliberal capitalist societies governing by the profit and self-efficiency ideology.