Von Korallen, Chipkarten, medizinischen Informationen und der Jungfrau Maria: Heilpraktiker in Deutschland und die Aneignung der Ayurveda-Therapie : Antinomien kultureller Aneigung

In this paper I address the question of appropriation by examining the diversity of medical practices in Germany by looking at their institutions of the Kur and the Heilpraktiker and their panoply of therapeutic practices. I do this by describing the poly-therapeutics of a Heilpraktiker in an Ayurvedic spa in an attempt to argue that the panoply, housed in a single person, produces a mangled medical episteme that befuddles any clear distinction between source and recipient traditions, or in this context between medicine and alternative medicine. I then attempt to offer an explanation at several levels for this epistemic and cultural mangling by discussing a) through a local register, the German institution of the Heilpraktiker within the larger context of the German health care system in terms of its legal, economic and pedagogic structures; and b) through a global register and the practice of bio-medicine, to argue that the panoply is partly the sign of an epistemic impasse at the heart of biomedicine. This impasse summons of both practitioners and patients the panoply, leading them to borrow, steal, adapt, appropriate or expropriate from several spheres — such as religion, rocket science, or astrology ― in an attempt to make the panoply not merely a complete and impressive collection of things against adversary but a necessary therapeutic armoury that resonates with its older meaning of being a complete spiritual armoury for warfare against the Adversary (c. f. the Panoply of God, Ephesians, 6:13).