Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine
ISBN: 9780520951587
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Medicine Tibetan Traditional -- Tibet; Asian Continental Ancestry Group -- ethnology -- Tibet; Holistic Health -- Tibet;

Tibetan medicine has come to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. On the one hand it must retain a sense of cultural authenticity and a connection to Tibetan Buddhism; on the other it must prove efficacious and safe according to biomedical standards. Recently, Tibetan medicine has found a place within the multibillion-dollar market for complementary, traditional, and herbal medicines as people around the world seek alternative paths to wellness. Healing Elements explores how Tibetan medicine circulates through diverse settings in Nepal, China, and beyond as commercial goods and gifts, and as target therapies and panacea for biophysical and psychosocial ills. Through an exploration of efficacy - what does it mean to say Tibetan medicine "works"? - this book illustrates a bio-politics of traditional medicine and the meaningful, if contested, translations of science and healing that occur across distinct social ecologies.

Sienna Craig is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage Through the Himalaya and coeditor of Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds .