India has long occupied an important place in Tibetan medicine's history and development. However, Indian Himalayan practitioners of Tibetan medicine, or amchi, have largely remained overlooked at the Tibetan medical periphery, despite playing a central social and medical role in their communities. Power and legitimacy, religion and economic development, biomedical encounters and Indian geopolitics all intersect in the work and identities of contemporary Himalayan amchi. This volume examines the crucial moment of crisis and transformation that occurred in the early 2000s to offer insights into the beginnings of Tibetan medicine's professionalization, industrialization, and official recognition in India and elsewhere. Based on fine-grained ethnographic studies in Ladakh, Zangskar, Sikkim, and the Darjeeling Hills, Healing at the Periphery asks how the dynamics of capitalism, social change, and the encounter with biomedicine affect small communities on the fringes of modern India, and, conversely, what local transformations of Tibetan medicine tell us about contemporary society and health care in the Himalayas and the Tibetan world.

Contributors. Florian Besch, Calum Blaikie, Sienna R. Craig, Barbara Gerke, Isabelle Guerin, Kim Gutschow, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Stephan Kloos, Fernanda Pirie, Laurent Pordie

About the Author
Laurent Pordie is Senior Researcher, Research Unit on Science, Medicine, Health, and Society at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Stephan Kloos is the Acting Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Reviews
"These wonderfully detailed ethnographic studies look at 'Tibetan Medicine' from the peripheries and the grass roots of Indian Himalayan regions. A diverse and populous amchi medicine is here revealed as plural, embedded in communities and in history, and much valued by sick and healthy people alike. This volume promises to completely recast and thoroughly pluralize Tibetan studies and Asian medical history." -- Judith Farquhar, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Chicago



Book Information
ISBN 9781478014454
Author Laurent Pordie
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 318g