Tibetan medicine has come to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. On the one hand, it must retain a sense of cultural authenticity and a connection to Tibetan Buddhism; on the other hand, it must be proven efficacious and safe according to biomedical standards, often through clinical research. Recently, Tibetan medicine has found a place within the multi-billion-dollar market for complementary, traditional, and herbal medicines as people around the world seek alternative paths to wellness. Healing Elements explores Tibetan medicine within diverse settings, from rural schools a ... More

Tibetan medicine has come to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. On the one hand, it must retain a sense of cultural authenticity and a connection to Tibetan Buddhism; on the other hand, it must be proven efficacious and safe according to biomedical standards, often through clinical research. Recently, Tibetan medicine has found a place within the multi-billion-dollar market for complementary, traditional, and herbal medicines as people around the world seek alternative paths to wellness. Healing Elements explores Tibetan medicine within diverse settings, from rural schools and clinics in the Nepal Himalaya to high-tech factories and state-supported colleges in the People’s Republic of China. This multi-sited ethnography explores how Tibetan medicines circulate as commercial goods and gifts, as target therapies, and as panacea for biosocial ills. Through an exploration of efficacy—What does it mean to say that Tibetan medicine “works”?—this book illustrates a biopolitics of traditional medicine in the twenty-first century. Healing Elements examines the ways in which traditional medicine interacts with biomedicine: from patient-healer relationships and the cultural meanings ascribed to affliction to the wider circumstances in which practitioners are trained, healing occurs, and medicines are made, evaluated, and used. As such, it examines the meaningful, if contested, translations of science and healing that occur within and across distinct social ecologies.