India and its vibrant medical pluralism
India has long been famous for its vibrant medical pluralism, which consists of biomedicine sharing legitimacy with alternative and traditional forms of medicine, such as Ayruveda. In this presentation, I argue that we find the same type of pluralism, uncertainty and contestation in the field of agriculture and food production, in which ideas of industrial production based on principle of the so-call Green Revolution coexist with a variety of alternative ways of practicing agriculture and understanding its principles. I focus on the empirical example of soil health that further argue that these two forms of pluralism share many commonalities, in particular in the way microbial relations are valued and understood both in health and ecology.
Short biography
Associate Professor Daniel Münster is working at Department of Community Medicine and Global Health. His research is located at the intersection of medical and environmental anthropology. Drawing on ethnography and historical anthropology, he studies power, health, and ecology in the contemporary world. He has focused his work on rural communities in the Global South. Daniel's ethnographic work with smallholder farmers in South India explores the possibilities for an alternative agriculture based on decolonial and ecological understandings of people and their non-human others, including plants, animals, microbes and soils.
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SHEtalks are a serial of informal research seminars held at Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education, University of Oslo. SHEtalks are research lunch lectures. The 2024 program was put together by researcher Gabriela Saldanha. Seminars take place at Thursdays at noon (GTM+1) unless otherwise specified. They may be delivered and attended in person or via zoom.
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