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"This is my gif found on the internet about how much I love my new job being a clinical researcher for Yale in New York City, which is a lot."

By Ron Barrett
University of California Press

Anthropologist Ron Barrett’s study of the Aghori healing tradition in India is, like many texts in medical anthropology, simultaneously a fascinating page-turner and a dense forest of academic jargon. Barrett traces the unique history of a specific sect of Aghori healers, who currently reside in an ashram in Banaras, a city in northern India.

In India, there is a complex set of social taboos that relate to pollution and dirtiness, which are explicitly linked to the Indian caste system. The caste system divides societal groups into a rigid set of social classes, with Brahmins at the top and “untouchables” (now called Dalits) residing on the bottom. The Aghori renounced the caste system and lived as a dispersed community of ascetics who partook in uncommon spiritual activities that included meditating on corpses and eating human flesh and feces. The point of these activities was to face the ultimate taboo, thus, overcoming stifling illusions (e.g., the fear of death and social inequality).

Ron Barrett studied the Kina Ram lineage of Aghori. This particular lineage abandoned the anti-social asceticism of past Aghori and has redirected their efforts toward social service. In particular, the Kina Ram Ashram has become a place of healing for those who are ill. In India, leprosy, various skin diseases, and infertility are all afflictions that are non-lethal and not contagious, yet nevertheless carry with them social death. Lepers are generally unable to marry and must move away from their families - lest their illness harm family members’ chance of marriage.

“Aghor” translates as “not terrible.” The unifying concept between Aghori medicine is that the Aghori do not recognize the terrible social designations placed on certain illnesses or states of being. Aghori healers do not fear lepers. They do not fear derogatory social designations, nor, ideally, do they fear death. Barrett emphasizes that those who visit the Aghori ashrams and clinics to be healed do not necessarily take on the nondiscriminatory stance of their Aghori healers. They come to place their illnesses and social stigma onto the Aghori, not to transform their own prejudices. Nevertheless, the Aghori’s unique acceptance of death and pollution enables them to face their patients with a nondiscriminatory attitude that, hopefully, has a ripple effect in Indian society.

Barrett’s ethnography is fascinating in its exploration of how one specific healing system relates to broader attitudes toward illness and death in India, a country renowned for its heterogeneous medical systems. Barrett is also aware of the conflict inherent in the Aghori’s concurrent participation in society and theoretical opposition to the social stratification of this same society. Barrett shows how the Kina Ram lineage transformed into a popular sect through its social service projects, how this transformation entailed financial partnerships with the powers-that-be, and, ultimately, deepened connections with the social systems the Aghori opposed.

The major downfall of Barrett’s ethnography is his sometimes-excessive tendency to place each and every observation about the Aghori into a particular theoretical framework. Barrett’s work is a product of academia, and while it is common to fit one’s own research into the past theories of the given discipline, in this case anthropology, this was done with such frequency that details about the Aghori were sometimes neglected for details about esoteric theoretical contentions. Overall, however, Aghor Medicine adeptly introduces the reader to this system of healing and would be a worthwhile read for anyone interested in multicultural medicine.

Review by Katherine Don