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Dear list members,
Our first seminar for 2018 will be at 6:00-7:30pm on Wednesday March
7 in Lecture Theater S325 of the John Woolley Building,
University of Sydney.
We hope you can attend.
Kind regards,
AABS Executive
Trauma and Time: Tibetan Medical Responses to Nepal’s
2015 Earthquakes
It is often said that traditional medicine, including Tibetan medicine,
succeeds in the treatment of chronic conditions, whereas biomedicine is a
better option for acute care. This stereotype is voiced not only by
biomedical practitioners and patients but also by Tibetan physicians
themselves. Indeed, it is part of how Tibetan medical
“neo-traditionalism” operates. Even as this view is embraced and
validated by diverse social actors, it remains incomplete. The
limitations of this dichotomy become particularly apparent when
considering health care needs that are biological, psychological, and
social, such as those which emerge during states of emergency, including
natural disasters. Even so, determining how – or if – and to what
ends traditional medicine should be deployed in such moments remains
virtually absent in global health circles and under-represented in
scholarship on medical humanitarianism. Yet Tibetan physicians (who may
also be religious practitioners) are called to action in times of crisis.
This talk focuses on Buddhist approaches to healing, health, and illness
within the context of Himalayan and Tibetan communities. It is framed
around an ethnographic exploration of how practitioners of Sowa Rigpa (gso ba rig pa), the
Tibetan “science of healing,” responded to the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal
– and specifically the destruction experienced in the Langtang Valley,
Rasuwa District. By highlighting the roles of these practitioners—at once
doctors and monks or tantric ritual specialists—in responding to individual
and collective suffering, this talk will explore the relationship between
medical and Buddhist practice. In turn, this allows for a rethinking of
what traditional medicine is “good for,” particularly in relation to that
human urge of “the need to help”, including similarities and differences
between forms of secular humanitarianism and a Buddhist response to
crisis.
Sienna R. Craig is Associate
Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College (USA). She received her
PhD from Cornell University in 2006. A medical anthropologist whose work
focuses on cross-cultural experiences of medicine, health, and illness,
global and women’s health, and migration and social change, she is the
author of Horses Like
Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalayas (2008)
and Healing Elements:
Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012),
and the co-editor of Medicine
Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds
(2010), among other publications. From 2012-2017 she served as co-editor
of HIMALAYA,
Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, and she
serves on the Executive Council of the International Association for the
Study of Traditional Asian Medicines (IASTAM).
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