In recent years an increasing number of state-based heritage
protection schemes have asserted ownership over traditional medical
knowledge (TMK) through various forms of cultural documentation such as
archives, databases, texts, and inventories. Drawing on a close reading of
cultural disputes over a single system of TMK—the classical South
Asian medical tradition of Ayurveda—the paper traces some of the
problems, ambiguities, and paradoxes of making heritage legible.
The focus is on three recent state practices by the Indian government to
protect Ayurvedic knowledge, each revolving around the production of a
different cultural object: the translation of a seventeenth-century Dutch
botanical text; the creation of an electronic database known as the
Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL); and the discovery of an
Ayurvedic drug as part of a bioprospecting benefit-sharing scheme.
Examined together, they demonstrate that neither TMK, nor Ayurveda, nor
even the process of cultural documentation can be treated as monoliths in
heritage practice. They also reveal some complexities of heritage
protection on the ground and the unintended consequences that policy
imperatives and legibility set into motion. As the paper shows,
state-based heritage protection schemes inspire surprising
counterresponses by indigenous groups that challenge important assumptions
about the ownership of TMK, such as locality, community, commensurability,
and representation.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: My
grateful thanks first to Vijayendra Rao and Gayatri Reddy for invaluable
discussion and intellectual support; Debra Diamond, Jane Anderson, Lalitha
Gopalan, Michael Sappol, Alexander Bauer, and two anonymous referees for
extremely useful interdisciplinary insights; and to the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Smithsonian's Center of Folklife and Cultural
Heritage, particularly Richard Kurin, Carla Borden, James Early, and Peter
Seitel, for the ideal fellowship and venue to get this paper
written.