DIY global dissemination: How localization drives global travels

• In Event: 3221 - DIY Medicine: Hacking Health, Opting Out, Self-Medicating, and Consumer Resistance

Abstract

Where There Is No Doctor is one of the most widely used community health books in the world. Written in the 1970’s, it traveled around the world with health social movements focused on reclaiming agency over bodies and healthcare to become a classic DIY (do-it-yourself) health text. This paper explores the ways translators and editors change the books and the ways they stay the same, and the work this type of agility makes possible in terms of the organization of knowledge. I use the empirical example of changing home remedies and herbs across adaptations and translations to argue that it is the layered localization of Where There Is No Doctor, traveling with and in pluralistic contexts, that drive its global travels. First, I argue that the ways the books are adapted demonstrate how this flexibility makes the book a global object: its invitation and ability to change, while remaining recognizable, has allowed it to travel across 80 languages. Second, I argue that Where There Is No Doctor travels in medically pluralistic India because the book itself is medically pluralistic and includes critiques of herbal and allopathic medicines. Analyzing the adaptations of herbal remedies in the book, I argue that this represents an institutionalization of medical lore, a form of medical knowledge rarely acknowledged as having value, and privileges and integrates lay knowledges. This is a story of DIY adaptation – decentralized, creating layers of localization – and how it drives the global travels of a DIY health text.

Author

• Lillian Walkover, Drexel