Feb 11,2014
- A Talk
For centuries, Tibetan medicine constituted not only a vibrant field of scholarship and the prime health resource in Tibet, but also – together with Tibetan Buddhism – an important hegemonic tool to expand and consolidate Tibetan cultural and political influence far beyond the borders of Central Tibet. In the 20th century, however, two connected developments presented a serious rupture for Tibetan medical knowledge: the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the Tibetan government’s move into exile on the one hand, and the subsequent encounters with modern biomedicine and capitalism in Tibet and the exile on the other. Like Tibetan society as a whole, Tibetan medicine was thus faced with an unprecedented crisis, and became re-inscribed in a register of cultural loss and preservation. This paper will examine this transformation of Tibetan medicine in the particular context of the Indian exile. What happens when a previously hegemonic knowledge becomes fugitive and turns, faced with the risk of loss and a fundamental uncertainty regarding its future, into both the object and means of cultural preservation?
The first part of the paper will address these questions by historically exploring the processes of loss, preservation and transformation of Tibetan medical knowledge since 1959. I will argue that while the loss of knowledge constitutes a genuine concern for Tibetan medical practitioners, its preservation needs to be understood as an ethico-political process that produces and reconfigures the very knowledge it seeks to preserve.
The second part of the paper will explore the politics of Tibetan medical knowledge and its preservation/ production in the present context. Here, I will argue that Tibetan medicine serves as an important field for cultural and economic ties with the wider Tibetan cultural area (Mongolia, Buryatia, Bhutan, Ladakh and other Himalayan regions), through which Tibetans seek to maintain/reconstruct their old cultural influence beyond the Tibetan nation.
Despite the crisis and rupture of exile and modernization, Tibetan medicine thus constitutes an emerging knowledge industry with considerable hegemonic power in Tibet’s cultural contact zones.
Speaker: Stephan Kloos MSc, MPhil, PhD, Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Date: February 11th, 2013 (Tuesday) at 2:00 pm
Venue: Pope Paul VI Auditorium, St. John’s Research Institute
All are welcome
For more details, send an email to humanities_events@sjri.res.in or call 49467000