The recognition of Sowa Rigpa in India

In 2010, the Government of India officially recognized Tibetan medicine as an ‘Indian system of medicine’ called ‘Sowa Rigpa’. This article documents the processes that led to Sowa Rigpa’s recognition, and situates them at the confluence of economic interests and political strategies within a larger historical and cultural context. Recognition emerges here as a twofold process that makes Sowa Rigpa legible to the state while simultaneously facilitating its incorporation into the market as capital. Previously an inalienable part of Tibetan and Buddhist Himalayan cultural heritage, Sowa Rigpa could now be legitimately claimed or appropriated as cultural, political, or economic capital, giving rise to tensions over ownership and control. Tracing how Sowa Rigpa’s recognition transformed from an initial struggle for protection to one over control, this article offers a critical new perspective on the recognition of cultural heritage, India’s pluralistic health care system, and the Asian traditional pharmaceutical industry

Tibetan Medicine in Exile: The ethics, politics and science of cultural survival

This dissertation combines ethnography, history and critical analysis to produce the first comprehensive account of Tibetan medicine in exile to date. Beginning with exile-Tibetan medicine's fundamental claim, it asks how its practitioners and institutions strive to simultaneously "preserve Tibetan culture" and "help the world". I argue that Tibetan medicine "preserves" Tibetan culture and produces a modern Tibetan nation by instantiating, materializing and validating Tibetan Buddhist ethics - and thus Tibetan culture and nation - in its medical knowledge, its institutions, doctors, pills, and efficacy. At the same time, it claims to "help the world" not only by transforming itself into a globally recognized (and recognizable) system of alternative medicine providing herbal pills to an international community of patients, but also by producing an alternative, uniquely Tibetan modernity that addresses the perceived shortcomings and desires of Western modernity. The dissertation is organized in seven chapters including the introduction. After outlining the analytic framework and introducing the subject matter in the introduction, the chapters proceed from the historical background of Tibetan medicine in exile to the ways traditional connections between ethics, politics and money have been (and are) renegotiated since the 1960s, to the transformation of exile-Tibetan medicine into a medical system and efforts to achieve legal recognition, to finally Tibetan medicine's engagement with modern science.Through providing an in-depth ethnography of how the Men-Tsee-Khang, Tibetan medicine's first and most important institution in exile, engages and redefines modernity, this dissertation explores how ethics, politics and the capitalist market come together in the production of pills, a "traditional medical system," cultural identity and a nation in the transnational context of exile. This dissertation thus speaks to a number of audiences, beginning with the practitioners of Tibetan medicines themselves, to Tibet scholars and scholars of Asian medicine, to medical anthropologists interested in processes of medical standardization, the production of medical systems and the pharmaceuticalization of medicine, to socio-cultural anthropologists and political theorists engaging with contemporary reconfigurations of cultural identity, ethical subjectivities, the capitalist market and the nation

Introduction: The Indian Face of Sowa Rigpa

International audienc

Perception of strength and power of realistic male characters

We investigated the influence of body shape and pose on the perception of physical strength and social power for male virtual characters. In the first experiment, participants judged the physical strength of varying body shapes, derived from a statistical 3D body model. Based on these ratings, we determined three body shapes (weak, average, and strong) and animated them with a set of power poses for the second experiment. Participants rated how strong or powerful they perceived virtual characters of varying body shapes that were displayed in different poses. Our results show that perception of physical strength was mainly driven by the shape of the body. However, the social attribute of power was influenced by an interaction between pose and shape. Specifically, the effect of pose on power ratings was greater for weak body shapes. These results demonstrate that a character with a weak shape can be perceived as more powerful when in a high-power pose