This doctoral dissertation research, supported by the Science, Technology & Society program at NSF, examines the project of preserving India's traditional medical system. This preservation project has resulted in inter-cultural medical research, but sets modern biomedical parameters for confirming the authority of indigenous (Ayurvedic) medical practice. The National Policy on Indian Systems of Medicine framed by the Government of India in 2001 produces new terms of legitimacy for Ayurveda at the international level. The policy adapts and appropriates Ayurvedic science in response to demands for international accountability in medical science research, with a simultaneous consciousness to national positioning of the Ayurvedic medical system. This research brings together tools and concepts from science and technology studies and anthropologies of globalization to investigate three questions. First, how does the state narrative of "preserving culture" interface with enforcement of international standards of scientific research protocol (e.g., to validate Complementary and Alternative Medicine research in the US)? Secondly, how do two collaborating groups of scientists (biomedical and Ayurvedic) negotiate diverse epistemologies to develop a "modern" Ayurvedic pharmacopoeia? Finally, how do Ayervedic scientists understand "inter-cultural" medical research as they seek to emerge as members of the global scientific medical community and full-fledged members of the Indian health care community at the same time? The use of textual and ethnographic methods to explore scientific work in this research permits a focus on a unique stage in medical encounters in a postcolonial society. This research shifts the focus beyond the incorporation of biomedical knowledge in Ayurvedic clinics to the collaborative development of Ayurvedic knowledge with biomedical scientists in pharmacological laboratories. This dissertation research will add to the few sustained studies investigating the micro-level encounter between two major systems of medical knowledge in India by identifying the laboratory as the formative locus of this encounter. Additionally, this research will situate the evolution of Ayurvedic knowledge as a unique moment in the history of the institutionalization of traditional medical knowledges that "preserves" by collaborating across national and global margins. The close observation, participation and description that an ethnographic mode of inquiry brings to this project will analyze not only discourses, but also the scientific practices that may transform Ayurveda's own approach to the body, disease, health and healing.
