Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World: Global Politics of Medical Knowledge and Practice

Abstract

Until recently, historians of South Asian ‘indigenous’ medicines were almost exclusively concerned with erudite, textual editions of these medical traditions. This had meant that the study of popular practical forms of these traditions was almost exclusively left to medical anthropologists. As a consequence, an increasing number of medical anthropologists in recent years have turned to the study of ‘globalization’, many have feared that the study of popular subaltern healing might fall into an academic aporia. Pordié's book will go far in assuaging such anxieties. The book shows that a perspective on ‘global’ dynamics need not be at the expense of the study of local, rural practitioners. Indeed it might be said that this book is concerned throughout with the description of how the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ both mutually fashion and produce each other. This follows in the wake of such earlier collections as Joseph Alter's Globalization and Asian Medicine (2005) and Linda Connor and Geoffrey Samuel's Healing Powers and Modernity in Asian Societies (2001). These works inaugurated a change of mood which refused to see contemporary changes in the practice and theory of Asian medicines as a ‘degeneration’ of an ‘authentic’ ancient canon. A mood, which though intimated, had remained muted in the two pioneering collections of Charles Leslie (Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study, 1974, and Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, co-edited with Allan Young, 1992). These works had also sought to explore contemporary reconfigurations beyond the narrow confines of single nation-states. Both these objectives are furthered considerably in Pordié's collection. Where Pordié's collection goes even further, however, is that, by concentrating on what is—at least in a loose sense—a single tradition, Tibetan medicine, it achieves a much greater acuity of vision. Many of the essays speak to each other, achieving in the process a mutually constitutive thickness of description and analysis for the collection as a whole.