Healing at the Periphery: Ethnographies of Tibetan Medicine in India

India has long occupied an important place in Tibetan medicine's 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's 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

Author: Laurent Pordié
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 01/12/2022
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.67lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.47d
ISBN13: 9781478014454
ISBN10: 1478014458
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- History | Asia | General
- Medical | History

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.