Medicine Between Science and Religion (eBook)

Vincanne Adams is Professor and Director of the University of California San Francisco Graduate Program in Medical Anthropology (joint with UC Berkeley). Her books include Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas (1996), Doctors for Democracy (1998) and Sex and Development (with Stacy Pigg, 2005).

Mona Schrempf is a social and cultural anthropologist and post-doctoral research fellow at the East medicine Research Centre, Complementary Medicine, School of Life Sciences, University of Westminster London (2012-2015). Her present research concerns the globalisation of Tibetan medicine(s) in Europe and Asia that is part of the Wellcome Trust funded project “Beyond Tradition: Ways of Knowing and Styles of Practice in East Asian Medicines 1000 to the Present”. She is senior co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity. Having studied at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University of Berlin (PhD 2001), with a focus on the anthropology of ritual, performance and religion in South Asia, she has undertaken long-term ethnographic research and fieldwork in rural Tibetan communities in China, the Indian Himalayas and Bhutan on Tibetan medicine, ritual healing, public and women’s reproductive health as well as religious festivals and ethnic identity. Her books are Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society (eds. with S. Craig, M. Cuomu, F. Garrett, IITBS  2010), Figurations of Modernity. Global and Local Representations in Comparative Perspective (eds. with V. Houben, Campus 2008), and Soundings in Tibetan Medicine (ed., Brill 2007).

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).

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 McKay

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