ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an ethnographic exploration of the relationship between tuberculosis, gender and social change, based upon research conducted during a year of fieldwork in the Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh), India, between 2000 and 2001. The first part of the chapter is an overview of the incidence of tuberculosis in the Tibetan refugee community, while the second part offers a case study focusing on the treatment of one female tuberculosis sufferer in Dharamsala. Through this case study I propose that the epidemiology of tuberculosis, as presented in part one, is echoed and transformed by the social meanings given to it by the community. Social change linked to exile is discussed and critiqued through the ‘medicalisation’ of social groups effecting change: thus, newcomer refugees who have come to India post-1980 come to be seen as ‘contagious’, and young ‘modern’ women to be perceived as a ‘risk group’.
