Duke University Press Healing at the Periphery: Ethnographies of Tibetan Medicine in India

Product Description India has long occupied an important place in Tibetan medicine\x27s history and development. However, Indian Himalayan practitioners of Tibetan medicine, or amchi, have largely remained overlooked at the Tibetan medical periphery, despite playing a central social and medical role in their communities. Power and legitimacy, religion and economic development, biomedical encounters and Indian geopolitics all intersect in the work and identities of contemporary Himalayan amchi. This volume examines the crucial moment of crisis and transformation that occurred in the early 2000s to offer insights into the beginnings of Tibetan medicine\x27s professionalization, industrialization, and official recognition in India and elsewhere. Based on fine\-grained ethnographic studies in Ladakh, Zangskar, Sikkim, and the Darjeeling Hills, Healing at the Periphery asks how the dynamics of capitalism, social change, and the encounter with biomedicine affect small communities on the fringes of modern India; and, conversely, what local transformations of Tibetan medicine tell us about contemporary society and health care in the Himalayas and the Tibetan world. Contributors. Florian Besch, Calum Blaikie, Sienna R. Craig, Barbara Gerke, Isabelle Guérin, Kim Gutschow, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Stephan Kloos, Fernanda Pirie, Laurent Pordié Review "These wonderfully detailed ethnographic studies look at 'Tibetan Medicine' from the peripheries and the grassroots in Indian Himalayan regions. A diverse and populous amchi medicine is here revealed as plural, embedded in communities and in history, and much valued by sick and healthy people alike. This volume promises to completely recast and thoroughly pluralize Tibet studies and Asian medical history."--Judith Farquhar, Professor of Anthropology Emerita, University of Chicago "This volume on Tibetan Medicine in India produces a dual sense of the vastness of this medicine's past (indeed its origins in the subcontinent and spread through the Tibetan hinterland) and the specificity of its return journeys arriving with the Tibetan diaspora. Through a palimpsest of ethnographic work, we are reminded of these practitioners' capacious ability to read the external conditions of life in the most minute of bodily disfunctions and the political, historical, social, and fiscal stakes of this task in different Himalayan contexts. This unique and scholarly collection will be of use to any scholar of comparative medical systems in the Asian context for years to come."--Vincanne Adams, coeditor of "Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds" About the Author Laurent Pordié is Senior Researcher, Research Unit on Science, Medicine, Health, and Society at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Stephan Kloos is the acting Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.