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Appropriation and Dementia in India

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Abstract

Biomedical technologies like MRI scans offer a way for carers and people with dementia to ‘see’ pathology, as a means to reorient their perceptions of the body and functionality. Through interpretive and syncretic processes, the MRI and the diagnosis of dementia facilitate the incorporation of the clinical category ‘dementia’ into social understandings of illness and care in India. Complex shifts occur as families and providers move from socio-cultural explanations of disruption to bio-social etiologies of the disease ‘dementia’ and then to socio-ecological frameworks of causality. Both the biomedicalisation of illness and the localisation of illness occur as the clinical category ‘dementia’ is folded into local understandings of illness and care. Through elucidating how the dialectic between biomedical and local knowledge is operationalized, we offer insights into how dementia is absorbed and appropriated into Indian cultural contexts.

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Notes

  1. Different recruitment and consent processes were used for people living with dementia and have been described elsewhere since this article does not present data from this group (see Czymoniewicz-Klippel et al. 2010).

  2. Publicly funded MRIs are billed at a lower rate than private scans but are not free of charge.

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Acknowledgements

BB was supported by Alzheimer’s Australia which funded a Postgraduate Research Scholarship in Social Research and Dementia, 2009–2010 and the Australian Federal Government Department of Science and Technology through the Endeavour Research Fellowship, 2008. We gratefully acknowledge these funders as well as the Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India for in-field support. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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  1. Department of General Practice, School of Primary Care, Monash University, Building 1, 270 Notting Hill, Melbourne, VIC, 3168, Australia

    Bianca Brijnath

  2. School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Lenore Manderson

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  1. Bianca Brijnath
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Correspondence to Bianca Brijnath.

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Brijnath, B., Manderson, L. Appropriation and Dementia in India. Cult Med Psychiatry 35, 501–518 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-011-9230-2

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