Bodily sovereignty as political sovereignty: 'self-care' in Kolkata, India

Abstract

This paper explores the potentials of applying Michel Foucault's notion of 'self-care' to issues in medical anthropology. While Foucault's writings on regimes of power/knowledge have had an enormous influence on medical anthropologists, his late works on the ethics of the self have not yet received much attention. This paper discusses Foucault's notion of self-care in relation to Ayurvedic interpretations of digestion in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta, India). In Kolkata, it is a widely held belief that attentive care of the self, and especially for the stomach, can set a person free from dependencies. Yet at the same time, 'modern' people are seen as unable to live up to the ethics of self-care. The parallel between bodily sovereignty and cultural/political sovereignty produces a discourse on 'lack of self-control' as one of the main reasons for continuing dependency in all spheres of life. How does Foucault's late work help to conceptualize these findings?