Nomad RSI - Therapeutic diversity and the environment

Laurent Pordié (2003). Pondicherry: PPSS 29, FIP, 83p.
Language: English.

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Issuing from an original synthesis including and particularizing certain aspects of the Buddhist doctrines, the “science of healing” (gso ba rig pa) which originated in Tibet, has spread in similar cultural contexts, as in Ladakh, Indian Himalayas. This medicine is differentiated but not isolated from religion. What place, then, does religion today assume in the lives of the Ladakhi practitioners of Tibetan medicine? How does medicine, as a social institution, negotiate its encounter with religion? This book addresses these questions by singling out two vantages of observation: institutionalization and the voluntary sector, after having defined the ideal religious frame surrounding medicine. It shows that the use of science by the practitioners of the urban elite, a central component in the political legitimation of Tibetan medicine, does not therefore really appear as antinomic to religion, on which their collective political identity fundamentally depends.