Books Published

Recipes for Immortality: Medicine, Religion and Community in South India
by Richard S Weiss

Oxford University Press has published a new book by Rick Weiss, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies. In Recipes for Immortality: Medicine, Religion and Community in South India (January 2009), Dr. Weiss asks how practitioners of traditional siddha medicine maintain their popularity in the modern world. While biomedicine might alleviate a patient's physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more: affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of immortality. Recipes for Immortality makes the case that medical authority is based not only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social identities, conceptions of history, secrecy, loss, and utopian promise.

While shedding light on their lives, vocations, and aspirations, the book also documents the challenges that siddha doctors face in the modern world, both from a biomedical system that claims universal efficacy, and also from the rival traditional medicine, ayurveda, which is promoted as the national medicine of an autonomous Indian state. Drawing on ethnographic data; premodern Tamil texts on medicine, alchemy, and yoga; government archival resources; college textbooks; and popular literature on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, Dr. Weiss presents an in-depth study of this traditional system of knowledge, which serves the medical needs of millions of Indians.

For more information on this book:

New Rights New Zealand
MYTHS, MARKETS AND MORALITIES
by PAUL MORRIS AND DOLORES JANIEWSKI

This book is an important study of the growth of the New Right in New Zealand in the years 1984 to 1999. Its value arises from the way it focuses on the global context of the economic and moral programmes for change in the 1980s and 1990s, aiming to provide a more accurate picture than that given either by those who see the reforms as part of the play of global capitalism or by those who see them in terms of local personalities and agendas.