Recipes for Immortality: Healing, Religion, and Community in South India
"This book is a skillful study of Siddha medicine, the least understood of the medical 'systems' of India.  Richard Weiss writes with great craft and strategy about traditions competing for medical authority in postmodernity, and very capably explores the tense dialectics between secrecy and revelation, magic and rationality, loss and revivalism, and the extraordinary and the banal.  This is required reading for anyone interested in Tamil culture and its unique expressions of concern with the legitimacy of its traditions."-- Martha Ann Selby, Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, The University of Texas at Austin"Richard Weiss'sRecipes for Immortalityis an original and timely contribution to contemporary debates on the discourses of tradition, science, and rationality in modern South Asia.  Based on a pioneering study and interpretation of primary texts, and on fieldwork among practitioners, the book offers illuminating insights, not only into the 19th- and 20th-century reformulation of the influential knowledge system and healing practices of Tamil siddha medicine, but into the ways in which this reformulation has shaped and tapped into Tamil narratives of self and community in modernity."--Indira Peterson, Professor of Asian Studies, Mount Holyoke College