Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the case of public health as an indicator of development in Pakistan. Public health faces the contest between indigenous knowledge/practices and contemporary medical research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper brings forth the role of culture in its classic sense as an important factor that constitutes and constructs the contested space of public health. This contest is between the research based knowledge and indigenous knowledge, the attempt is made to rationalize the development as a concomitant concept with research. The dichotomy is constructed to help make it a vivid idea where two alternative provisions are available to the population of Pakistan. This paper presents the two scenarios of research, one that helped adoption of indigenous knowledge and the other is advanced technology and industry based research. The example of the indigenous research is trial and error based inter-generational knowledge embedded in Ayurveda knowledge and prevalent among the Jogi (snake charmers) community and the other example of the other polarity is that of modern research about public health. Development is not limited to public health; rather it encompasses the economic and social aspects too that are coupled with public health. Therefore, development is reasoned following the reasoning style from Amartya Sen's (1999) idea of linking development with freedom. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Punjab among Jogi community. This paper will present the case of Pakistan, one of the Lower Middle Income Countries and will contribute to generate a debate about significance of public health as an indicator of development.