Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds

✍ Scribed by Vincanne Adams; Mona Schrempf; Sienna R. Craig

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 386
• Series: Epistemologies of Healing
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

There is a growing interest in studies that document the relationship between science and medicine - as ideas, practices, technologies and outcomes - across cultural, national, geographic terrain. Tibetan medicine is not only known as a scholarly medical tradition among other Asian medical systems, with many centuries of technological, clinical, and pharmacological innovation; it also survives today as a complex medical resource across many Asian nations - from India and Bhutan to Mongolia, Tibet (TAR) and China, Buryatia - as well as in Western Europe and the Americas. The contributions to this volume explore, in equal measure, the impacts of western science and biomedicine on Tibetan grounds - i.e., among Tibetans across China, the Himalaya and exile communities as well as in relation to globalized Tibetan medicine - and the ways that local practices change how such “science” gets done, and how this continually hybridized medical knowledge is transmitted and put into practice. As such, this volume contributes to explorations into the bi-directional flows of medical knowledge and practice.

✦ Table of Contents

Medicine between Science and Religion......Page 1
Series: Epistemologies of Healing......Page 2
Contents......Page 7
List of Figures......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 11
Notes on Transliteration......Page 13
Chapter 1: Introduction: Medicine in Translation between Science and Religion......Page 15
Part I: Histories of Tibetan Medical Modernities......Page 43
Chapter 2:Biomedicine in Tibet at the Edge of Modernity......Page 47
Chapter 3: Tibetan Medicine and Russian Modernities......Page 71
Part II: Producing Science, Truth and Medical Moralities......Page 93
Chapter 4: Navigating ‘Modern Science’ and ‘Traditional Culture’: the Dharamsala Men-Tsee-Khang in India......Page 97
Chapter 5: A Tibetan Way of Science: Revisioning Biomedicine as Tibetan Practice......Page 121
Chapter 6: Correlating Biomedical and Tibetan Medical Terms in Amchi Medical Practice......Page 141
Part III: Therapeutic Rituals, Situated Choices......Page 167
Chapter 7: Between Mantra and Syringe: Healing and Health-Seeking Behaviour in Contemporary Amdo......Page 171
Chapter 8: From Home to Hospital: the Extension of Obstetrics in Ladakh......Page 199
Chapter 9: From Empowerments to Power Calculations: Notes on Efficacy, Value and Method......Page 229
Part IV: Research in Translation......Page 255
Chapter 10: Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methodology in Tibetan Medicine: the History, Background and Development of Research in Sowa Rigpa......Page 259
Chapter 11:The Four Tantras and the Global Market: Changing Epistemologies of Drä (’bras) versus Cancer......Page 279
Chapter 12: Re-integrating the Dharmic Perspective in Bio-Behavioural Research of a ‘Tibetan Yoga’ (tsalungtrülkhor) Intervention for People with Cancer......Page 311
Chapter 13: Epilogue: Towards a Sowa Rigpa Sensibility......Page 333
Notes on Contributors......Page 347
Index......Page 351