Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Positioning Sowa Rigpa in India: Coalition and antagonism in the quest for recognition
Get PDFThe years leading up to the recognition of Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine) by the Government of India in 2010 saw unprecedented interaction between various branches of the tradition and the state apparatus. These interactions grew particularly intense during March 2008, when two conferences focusing on related issues took place. The first referred to ‘Tibetan medicine’ and was organised by Tibetan exile institutions, while the second spoke of ‘Sowa Rigpa’ and was hosted by a coalition of Himalayan Indian associations. Through detailed ethnography of these events, this article examines the way in which a medical system was discursively constructed and positioned on the brink of state enfranchisement. It shows how ‘discourse coalitions’ and antagonisms formed during these events, and enquires as to the implications of these for the balance of power in Sowa Rigpa and for its positioning in relation to the Indian state, technoscience, and the growing market for traditional medicines
The recognition of Sowa Rigpa in India: How Tibetan medicine became an Indian medical system
Get PDFIn 2010, the Government of India officially recognized Tibetan medicine as an ‘Indian system of medicine’ called ‘Sowa Rigpa’. This article documents the processes that led to Sowa Rigpa’s recognition, and situates them at the confluence of economic interests and political strategies within a larger historical and cultural context. Recognition emerges here as a twofold process that makes Sowa Rigpa legible to the state while simultaneously facilitating its incorporation into the market as capital. Previously an inalienable part of Tibetan and Buddhist Himalayan cultural heritage, Sowa Rigpa could now be legitimately claimed or appropriated as cultural, political, or economic capital, giving rise to tensions over ownership and control. Tracing how Sowa Rigpa’s recognition transformed from an initial struggle for protection to one over control, this article offers a critical new perspective on the recognition of cultural heritage, India’s pluralistic health care system, and the Asian traditional pharmaceutical industry
Ecologies of evidence in a mysterious epidemic
Get PDFAn epidemic in a Venezuelan rainforest in 2007-2008 killed 38 children and young adults, puzzling clinicians, epidemiologists, and healers alike for over a year. This essay traces the way each contribution to knowledge production formed part of a larger ecology of evidence. Focusing on how the parents\u27 knowledge was exploited and denigrated by clinicians, epidemiologists, and healers alike points to the health/communicative inequities—grossly unequal distributions of access to the production and circulation of evidence—that structured ecologies of evidence in ways that thwarted diagnosis. Recruiting a nurse, a healer, a physician, and an anthropologist, two indigenous leaders launched an investigation that juxtaposed parents\u27 narratives, vernacular healing, epidemiology, and clinical medicine, resulting in a clinical diagnosis of bat-transmitted rabies. This case suggests that perspectives in global health will fail to become fully critical unless they attend to health/communicative inequities, how they structure ecologies of evidence, and strategies for transforming them
After war
Get PDFIn the United States – as in other places in the ambit of biomedicine – the efforts exerted on and by injured soldiers’ bodies in the aftermath of war are generally understood under the familiar medical rubric of ‘rehabilitation’. This reflection troubles that term by moving away from the medical logic of rehabilitation and its telos of injury and healing, and the logics that see injured soldiers as promising bodies. Instead, the think piece explores a wider range of practices of attention to injured soldiers’ bodies that emerge ethnographically, and traces embodied forms of being made within unsteady temporalities of life, health, and death after war, forms that call the temporality of rehabilitation into question and highlight care’s collateral affects. I reflect on the phenomenon of heterotopic ossification – bone growth at the site of injury that is a sign of healing that is also itself a form of injury – to think through the confounding analytical, ethical, political, and corporeal implications of such a space
