IASTAM (International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine) Conference: Beyond Integration: Reflections on Asian Medicines in the 21st Century

Beyond Integration: Reflections on Asian Medicines in the 21st Century, ICTAM VIII (the Eights International Congress on Traditional Asian Medicine), Sancheong, South Korea, September 9-13, 201

The Potency of Tradition

Turquoise, coral, rubies, diamonds, amber, and pearls are among the potent substances used in Tibet’s medical traditions, specifically in ‘precious pills’ or rinchen rilbu (rin chen ril bu). Tibetan physicians use precious stones as medicines only after processing, without which none of them are considered medically beneficial. In this paper, I analyze three precious substances—turquoise, coral, and pearl—which appear together in many precious pill formulas and are processed using the same techniques. Based on textual analysis and interviews with Tibetan physicians in India, I address the questions: What makes these substances particularly ‘potent,’ expressed in the Tibetan term nüpa (nus pa)? How and why are these substances processed for use in medicines, and how is processing linked to nüpa? I argue that Tibetan medical practitioners authenticate their tradition of using precious stones as potent substances primarily through relying on authoritative texts and oral transmission, since the direct sensoexperiential understanding of the stones’ nüpa is limited compared to the more sensorial assessments of the nüpa of plants through smell and taste. Findings show that potency of precious stones emerges as a complex synergy of interactions between substances and their socio-historical, religious, economic, and political values, which are all encapsulated in ‘tradition.’ In line with Neveling and Klien (2010) and Scheid (2007), I look at tradition as a fluid process of knowledge transmission over time, and analyze what happens when practitioners try to explain the rationale behind processing practices they still meticulously follow, and how questioning, especially by foreign researchers, might influence practitioners to call on biomedical science to explain tradition

Moving from efficacy to security: a changing focus in the study of Asian medical systems

After living and studying in India for a decade, I enrolled in the Master's course in Medical Anthropology at Oxford in 2002 as one of twelve students from five countries. Studying at Oxford was such an inspiring experience that I continued with a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology, researching longevity practices and concepts of the life-span in Tibetan societies in India (Gerke 2012a). I then taught at three universities in the USA and Germany, and pursued a post-doc at the Humboldt University, Berlin, on detoxification methods in Tibetan pharmacology and on how ideas of toxicity are translated cross-culturally (2011-2015). Critical course discussions that we had at Oxford on efficacy made me look at issues of safety and helped me think anthropologically about toxicity. How can we study toxic ingredients of medicines with research methods specific to anthropology in the absence of laboratories and biomedical testing tools? Looking at changing anthropological approaches to efficacy and safety are my entry points for this article, which provides some of the groundwork necessary to address questions of how Tibetan doctors translate their ideas of toxicity and detoxification to a Western audience

Thinking through complex webs of potency

The epidemic of COVID-19 caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been in the headlines since December 2019. This Think Piece presents ethnographic vignettes from a recent (February 2020) field visit to Dharamsala, where the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and a Tibetan exile community reside in the northwestern Indian Himalayas. At that time there were no COVID-19 cases in India except in Kerala, South India, which had three confirmed cases. There were no cases in Tibetan communities in India, but they were considered vulnerable because of the influx of Buddhist pilgrims from China. My ethnographic focus is on traditional Tibetan medical responses of prevention and conceptions of contagion prior to any outbreak. I explore what counts as prevention, protection, and contagion in a Tibetan medical public outreach context during pre-epidemic days, and how politics and fear of ‘the other’ merge with the preventive aspects of traditional medicinal products and public health announcements in Dharamsala. Taken together, these ethnographic vignettes illustrate how local epidemic imaginaries draw on complex webs of potency. These combine, for example, substances and their smells with mantras, protective oils, and facemasks in varied ways, all in an effort to reduce anxiety and prevent contagion

Introduction | Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia

Introduction to themed research articles on Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia

Naming and forgetting

Sowa Rigpa is generally translated as ‘the science of healing’ and often used synonymously for ‘Tibetan medicine’. Historically, Sowa Rigpa can be considered a borrowed term from Sanskrit, accompanied by an adopted sense of ‘science’, which initially signified all forms of medicine known to the Tibetan world, regardless of their place of origin. Over the centuries, Sowa Rigpa became linked to local, indigenous, and ‘enskilled’ practices; later, to nationalist political sensibilities; and of late to cultural belonging. The term evokes territoriality, claims to ownership of knowledge, concerns over sustaining national identities, and considerations about how place-based healing practices and material resources relate to the globalizing ideas about traditional Asian medicines. Textual and ethnographic analyses and interviews with practitioners from China, India, and Nepal show how Sowa Rigpa exists at once as a marker of shared intellectual and cultural histories and forms of medical practice and as a label for a globally circulating medical system with distinct interpretations. Looking at Sowa Rigpa as operating in de- and reterritorialized global spaces makes visible how, why, and to what end modernity forgets (Connerton 2009), thereby allowing for broader conclusions applicable to other medical contexts