Healing at the Periphery

Description

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 The contributors to Healing at the Periphery examine Sowa Rigpa, or Tibetan medicine, and the central part practitioners of Tibetan healing known as amchis play in Indian Himalayan communities and the exile Tibetan community. 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. Introduction. The Indian Face of Sowa Rigpa / Stephan Kloos and Laurent Pordié  1
1. The Amchi as Villager: Status and Its Refusal in Ladakh / Fernanda Pirie  23
2. Good Medicines, Bad Hearts: The Social Role of the Amchi in a Buddhist Dard Community / Stephan Kloos  41
3. Where There is No Amchi: Tibetan Medicine and Rural-Urban Migration Among Nomadic Pastoralists in Ladakh / Calum Blaikie  65
4. The Monetarization of Tibetan Medicine: An Ethnography of Village-Based Development Activities in Lingshed / Florian Besch and Isabelle Guérin  95
5. The Amchi at the Margins: Notes on Childbirth Practices in Ladakh / Laurent Pordié and Pascale Hancart Petitet  119
6. A Case of Wind Disorder: The Interplay of Amchi Medicine and Ritual Treatments in Zangskar / Kim Gutschow  143
7. Allegiance to Whose Community? Effects of Men-Tsee-Khang Policies on the Role of Amchi in the Darjeeling Hills / Barbara Gerke  171
Afterword. When "Periphery" Becomes Central / Sienna R. Craig  197
Contributors  201
Index  205

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