There is a growing interest in studies that document the relationship between science and medicine – as ideas, practices, technologies and outcomes – across cultural, national, geographic terrain. Tibetan medicine is not only known as a scholarly medical tradition among other Asian medical systems, with many centuries of technological, clinical, and pharmacological innovation; it also survives today as a complex medical resource across many Asian nations – from India and Bhutan to Mongolia, Tibet (TAR) and China, Buryatia – as well as in Western Europe and the Americas. The contributions to this volume explore, in equal measure, the impacts of western science and biomedicine on Tibetan grounds – i.e., among Tibetans across China, the Himalaya and exile communities as well as in relation to globalized Tibetan medicine – and the ways that local practices change how such “science” gets done, and how this continually hybridized medical knowledge is transmitted and put into practice. As such, this volume contributes to explorations into the bi-directional flows of medical knowledge and practice.
Tabella dei contenuti
List of Illustrations
List of Figures and Maps
Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Chapter 1. Medicine in Translation between Science and Religion
Vincanne Adams, Mona Schrempf and Sienna R. Craig
PART I: HISTORIES OF TIBETAN MEDICAL MODERNITIES
Chapter 2. Biomedicine in Tibet at the Edge of Modernity
Alex Mc Kay
Chapter 3. Tibetan Medicine and Russian Modernities
Martin Saxer
PART II: PRODUCING SCIENCE, TRUTH AND MEDICAL MORALITIES
Chapter 4. Navigating ‘Modern Science’ and ‘Traditional Culture’: The Dharamsala Men-Tsee-Khang in India
Stefan Kloos
Chapter 5. A Tibetan Way of Science: Revisioning Biomedicine as Tibetan Practice
Vincanne Adams, Rinchen Dhondup and Phuoc Le
Chapter 6. Correlating Biomedical and Tibetan Medical Concepts in Amchi Medical Practice
Barbara Gerke
PART III: THERAPEUTIC RITUALS AND SITUATED CHOICES
Chapter 7. Between Mantra and Syringe: Healing and Health-Seeking Behaviour in Contemporary Amdo
Mona Schrempf
Chapter 8. The Extension of Obstetrics In Ladakh
Kim Gutschow
Chapter 9. From Empowerments to Power Calculations: Notes on Efficacy, Value, and Method
Sienna R. Craig
PART IV: RESEARCH IN TRANSLATION
Chapter 10. Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methodology in Tibetan Medicine: History, Background, and Development of Research in Sowa Rigpa
Mingji Cuomu
Chapter 11. The Four Tantras and the Global Market: Changing Epistemologies of Drä (’bras) versus Cancer
Olaf Czaja
Chapter 12. Re-integrating the Dharmic Perspective in Bio-Behavioural Research of a Tibetan Yoga Intervention (tsalung trükhor) for People with Cancer
M. Alejandro Chaoul
Epilogue
Chapter 13. Towards a Sowa Rigpa Sensibility
Geoffrey Samuel
Index
Circa l’autore
Sienna R. Craig is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012) and Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalayas(2008), and the co-editor of Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society(2011).