Natural by Constitution: Essentialist Cognition and the Gendering of Women’s Health in Ayurvedic Marketing
Abstract
Medicine emerged as a modern institution in the 20th century which treats male and female bodies at par with each other. Critical scholarship has pointed out how modern allopathic western medicine excludes women both in the conceptualisation and implementation of medicinal knowledge. While exclusion of women has been a debated concern in the context of western medicine, Ayurveda on the other hand constitutes a culturally specific ideal of women in the Indian context. This paper argues that Ayurveda does not neglect women; it produces a normative figure of the ideal Indian woman, defined through reproduction in its classical formulations and through beauty, purity and “naturalness” in its commercial ones. Existing scholarly accounts document this content but leave a question unanswered: why are such representations persuasive and resistant to revision? The paper brings cognitive science to bear on the sociological material, proposing that Ayurvedic discourse recruits three general features of human cognition — psychological essentialism about natural kinds, an ideational preference for the natural, and schema-consistent processing of gendered information — so that culturally contingent norms arrive as facts about bodies. The concept of prakriti, an innate and unalterable constitution, is examined as an essential placeholder of unusual cultural potency. Survey data from 94 urban Indian women support three predictions. Belief that natural remedies are safer is statistically independent of willingness to rely on Ayurveda in serious illness (r = .09), indicating a judgement about provenance rather than efficacy. Self-rated knowledge correlates with endorsement of Ayurveda’s claims suggesting confidence indexes affiliation rather than calibrated understanding. Respondents report using Ayurveda overwhelmingly for prevention and functional complaints rather than appearance, which sits at odds with the beauty-centred address documented in the marketing literature.
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