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Anthropologists by this time had also come to understand, largely under the leadership of Charles Leslie, that highly elaborated medical traditions such as Ayurvedic, Unani, and Chinese medicine were dynamic, and porous, interacting with various local and global forces. The role of nationalism in keeping these “great traditions” of medicine vibrant also was theorized (see Leslie 1980). The general focus on how health-related experiences are shaped and expressed or given meaning locally was thus now complemented by efforts to examine how forces seen then as external to culture did the same.

Working in conditions of explicit change, first under the post-World War rubric of “development” and later as part of an acknowledged postcolonial transformation (see Marcus 2005), anthropologists increasingly studied, and created comparative frameworks for making sense of, health seeking, medical pluralism, and medical syncretism. Epistemological questions regarding evidentiary standards and modes of logic in medical decision-making were now raised more vociferously; theorists became concerned with the tendency to favor scientific or biomedical standards and the questions of legitimacy this can raise (Lock and Nichter 2002, pp. 4–5). New ideas about culture – and about neocolonial development and postcolonial existence – were given room to grow.