Beyond traditional medical practices of Mappilas: an ethnographic study on the Mappila community in the Malabar region of Kerala

Why do community-based healing practices continue to inform everyday healthcare decisions in a region where recognized medical systems such as biomedicine are widely available, accessible, and socially legitimate? I ethnographically examine this question through the Malabar Mappila community (MMC) of Kerala, India. I situate MMC healing within broader hierarchies of legitimacy that privilege dominant medical systems and trace the therapeutic ecology of community medicine and the social organization of therapeutic expertise. Instead of approaching traditional healing through the domain of limited access, affordability, or backwardness, the article argues that MMC healing is a ‘social institution’. In so doing, it offers the notion of the ‘body triangle’ as an alternative epistemology of bodily knowledge and therapeutic authority.