Alignments? X-ray Diversions, Haptics, Credibility—With a ‘Bone-Setting’ Clinic in Hyderabad City
Résumé
In this article, I engage with the diversions of technologies conventionally used for diagnostic scanning among practitioners who perform fracture-reduction and related manual interventions around bodily pain, ostensibly outside the mainstream orthopedic sector, in the city of Hyderabad, south central India. I attend to the performative dimensions of a technology-practice assemblage, and show how enactments of fracture reduction as viable and credible, targeted at establishment orthopedic surgeons, have been enabled through a distributive agency, afforded by scanning technologies. The use of X-rays and other medical scanning technologies by nonbiomedical practitioners have not displaced haptic and other technics of embodied knowledge, but they have been mobilized in order to create wider recognition of the practitioners’ skills. This is a process in which a new configuration of medical practice is constituted.