rereading Cohn

this is such a classic of dissecting "Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge." Kopi Kampung, it'd def. be benificial to take a quick look again at this and Hevia's English Lessons for ur paper.

Cohn's p. 162: "In the conceptual scheme which the British created to understand and to act in India, they constantly followed the same logic; they reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms. If Indians wore shoes in the presence of sahibs, they were being disrespectful in the early 19th century. But to Indians, the proper wearing of slippers or shoes stood for a whhole difference in cosmology.

The European concepts of custom and superstition were a means to encompass and explain behavior and thought, and allowed the British to save themselves the effort of understanding or adequately explaining the subtle or not-too-subtle meanings attached to the actins of their subjects."

I'm sure there's a lot to be dissected about the grotesque translation (or ensnaring) of "alternative" forms of healing under the conceptual stares of modern medicine, about what is being "reduced vastly" when transported between two whole different systems of meanings, different cosmologies, different epistemological spaces, or what our Khwaja often calls different "underlying grammars" :-)

Even the language of calling what's different "alternative," i feel, already takes for granted a norm at the center, from which the "alternative" deviates/differs. Do we acknowledge also that what we are having - whatever system or ways of doing or ways of relating... - is also an alternative among millions possible, and unfortunately, a pretty impoverished one more often than not...?