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Editorial
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Global Pharma in the Land of Snows: Tibetan Medicines, SARS, and Identity Politics Across Nations
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This article takes as its starting point the outbreak of the SARS epidemic in 2002–2003 in the People's Republic of China (PRC) to ask pertinent questions about the politics of identity in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), and to connect these issues to the circulation of, as well as the social and economic value placed on, Tibetan medicines within China and abroad. We aim to connect the global pharmaceutical industry—including the ways it shapes science, disseminates knowledge, increases market demand, and influences clinical and social practice—to the production of Tibetan identities. We discuss dramatic increases in the production and sale of Tibetan medicinal products, specifically protective amulets, 'precious pills', and incense, during a particularly traumatic and widely publicised public health crisis in the PRC. These products clearly demand that we rethink the category 'medicine'. The popularity of these products during the SARS epidemic also points to the complicated positions of Tibetans and Tibetan cultural forms within contemporary China. What was it about these products that gave rise to the perception among Chinese and Tibetans alike they could 'save' or 'protect' people from contracting SARS. In more general terms, we ask if this exponential growth of the Tibetan medical industry in China—heightened during the SARS epidemic, but continuing apace since then—is allowing for cultural expression that highlights Tibetan uniqueness difference within otherwise contested social and political arenas. Or, is the global pharmaceutical industry in China in the process of encompassing and reformulating Tibetan medicine? Finally, we explore connections and distinctions between the rise in highly marketed Tibetan medicinals in China and their availability and appeal in the West.
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Nourishing Life, Cultivation and Material Culture in the Late Ming: Some Thoughts on Zunsheng bajian (Eight Discourses on Respecting Life, 1591)
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This article sets out to explore the ideas and practices of yangsheng (nourishing life or health preservation) in the late Ming, i.e. late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century China. Yangsheng had long played a key role in the traditions of Chinese medicine, religions and court societies. Initially restricted to certain social classes and milieux, knowledge of yangsheng began to spread much more widely from the Song dynasty (960–1279) onwards, mostly owing to rapid social and economic change. In this context, the theories and practices of yangsheng attracted the attention and curiosity of many scholars. The popularisation of yangsheng peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Numerous literary works, essay collections and household encyclopaedias for everyday use have passages and sections on yangsheng. They describe various ideas and techniques of yangsheng by means of regulating the body in daily life, involving sleeping, exercising, washing, eating, drinking, etc. Through a survey of the most famous late Ming work on yangsheng, Zunsheng bajian (1591), this article attempts to highlight how yangsheng came to dominate the scholarly lifestyle. It will give a clear picture of the ideas of a late Ming literatus on prolonging life and replenishing the body, while showing how these practices were inspired by the flourishing material culture of the late Ming as a whole.
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Blood, Tigers, Dragons: The Physiology of Transcendence for Women
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This article sets out to compare visions of the female body and its processes found in Chinese medicine and in a Daoist tradition called nüdan, or female alchemy. This tradition, developed fully in the late Ming and Qing periods, describes the female body in ways very similar to those of Chinese medicine. However, despite the fact that loci, fluids and processes are described in a similar manner in the two textual traditions, the goals to reach are strikingly different. In the case of medicine, the goal is health, well-being, regularity, and the production of children, while in the case of female alchemy, the main goal is transcendence, achieved through the reversal of natural female processes like menstruation, gestation and childbirth.
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Modern Desires, Knowledge Control, and Physician Resistance: Regulating Ayurvedic Medicine in Nepal
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Forms of medical regulation in Nepal are shown to limit health knowledge transmission in the name of protecting the people from health care providers both familiar and trusted. Within the last four years Nepal's Ministry of Health implemented controversial legislation requiring Ayurvedic medical practitioners to register with the government in order to practise medicine and to prepare plant-based medications. Traditional practitioners find the age and lineage requirements for those not holding medical certification in Ayurveda potentially devastating to their profession, and they have launched an active campaign resisting the new professionalisation requirements. These actions can be seen to result from the convergence of a rising modern Nepali state bureaucracy, the people's desire for a country free of high rates of morbidity and mortality, and the powerful ideology of Western-based health care modernisation guiding health development. I draw on recent research in Kathmandu and in two rural communities to summarise the role of Ayurveda in Nepal's health care, to analyse the politics behind the legislation and the traditional healers' response, and finally to suggest the legislation's impact on health care.
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An Uighur Version of Vāgbhata's Astāngahrdayasamhitā
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The Astāngahrdayasamhitā (AHS), one of the most important works on Old Indian medicine (āyurveda), is unattested in Central Asia. Several fragments of the Berlin Turfan collection, however, can be attributed to an Uighur translation. They are edited, translated, commented on and provided with glossaries. Special attention is paid to the translation technique.
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Socio-Economic Dimensions of Tibetan Medicine in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China
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This article investigates some of the socio-economic dimensions of contemporary Tibetan healing practices in the rural areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in China. It sheds light on the workings and the effects the commodification of the official Chinese health care system, which started in the late 1990s, have had on Tibetan medicine and how these are related to the concurrent re-introduction of the Co-operative Medical Services (CMS) scheme throughout rural China.
The contribution to this journal is divided into two parts. Part One predominantly deals with the medical practitioners and the practices within governmental health care in the TAR. Part Two, which will be printed in the next issue of the journal, deals with the private sector of Tibetan medicine. Both parts focus on the situation in the Tsang or Shigatse region of the western and central TAR, hence enabling there to be useful comparisons with medical practices in the capital Lhasa, most of the anthropological literature has focused on so far. Both contributions are based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in Lhasa and the Tsang region of Tibet.
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A Body Of Knowledge: The Wellcome Ayurvedic Anatomical Man And His Sanskrit Context
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- A widely-known painting currently in the Wellcome Library (Iconographic 574912i) depicts an anatomical view of the male human body according to the tenets of classical Indian medicine, or ayurveda. The painting is surrounded by text passages in the Sanskrit language on medical and anatomical topics. In this paper, the Sanskrit texts are identified, edited, translated and assessed. I establish a terminus a quo for the painting, and explore the relationship of text and image.
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Daojiao yixue
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Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World: Global Politics of Medical Knowledge and Practice
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Notes on Contributors
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