Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Naming and forgetting: Sowa Rigpa and the territory of Asian medical systems
Get PDFSowa Rigpa is generally translated as ‘the science of healing’ and often used synonymously for ‘Tibetan medicine’. Historically, Sowa Rigpa can be considered a borrowed term from Sanskrit, accompanied by an adopted sense of ‘science’, which initially signified all forms of medicine known to the Tibetan world, regardless of their place of origin. Over the centuries, Sowa Rigpa became linked to local, indigenous, and ‘enskilled’ practices; later, to nationalist political sensibilities; and of late to cultural belonging. The term evokes territoriality, claims to ownership of knowledge, concerns over sustaining national identities, and considerations about how place-based healing practices and material resources relate to the globalizing ideas about traditional Asian medicines. Textual and ethnographic analyses and interviews with practitioners from China, India, and Nepal show how Sowa Rigpa exists at once as a marker of shared intellectual and cultural histories and forms of medical practice and as a label for a globally circulating medical system with distinct interpretations. Looking at Sowa Rigpa as operating in de- and reterritorialized global spaces makes visible how, why, and to what end modernity forgets (Connerton 2009), thereby allowing for broader conclusions applicable to other medical contexts
Theorizing global health
Get PDFReflecting on the recent West African Ebola outbreak, this piece advocates for a critical and people-centered approach both to and within global health. I discuss the current state of the field as well as critical theoretical responses to it, arguing that an ethnographic focus on evidence and efficacy at the local level raises rather than lowers the bar for thoughtful inquiry and action. The current moment calls less for the all-knowing hubris of totalizing analytical schemes than for a human science (and politics) of the uncertain and unknown. It is the immanent negotiations of people, institutions, technologies, evidence, social forms, ecosystems, health, efficacy, and ethics – in their temporary stabilization, production, excess, and creation – that animate the unfinishedness of ethnography and critical global health
Lower extremities
Get PDFHow might global health evidence waste away? The thing that generates evidence in this case, the metabolism, offers some possible answers to this question. But it does so, sometimes, only when things devolve. This essay takes up the case of amputation in the case of diabetes. The ethnography of atrophy highlights how knowing and embodiment wither, all while the thing that is supposed to absorb the world – the metabolism – offers less and less return on such a promise
Introduction: Ethnomedicine and medical anthropology today, in the case of Tibet
Get PDFThis collection of essays brings to light important themes in medical anthropology that have been eclipsed in recent years by theoretical turns toward problems of suffering, experience, and ontology (among others). Namely, they remind us of the importance of what was once popularly called the study of ‘ethnomedicine’
