Nomad RSI - Therapeutic diversity and the environment

Stephan Kloos (2004), Vienna: Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde, Heft 57, 188p.
Language: English.

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This detailed study of the socio-medical situation and history of the Buddhist Dard community in Hanu, Ladakh, examines the social role of the local practitioners of Tibetan medicine. Drawing from anthropological, historical, and sociological discourses on social roles, status, and power of healers, this book offers a rich analysis of the impacts of the newly introduced market economy and changing social norms on the traditional health care sector. Since the 1970s, these changes have posed an increasing – and sometimes existential – challenge to the medical practice and social power of amchi. At the same time, some amchi have been able to use the processes of globalization to their advantage, finding new ways to retain and legitimate their status and power. At the heart of this ethnography lies a discussion of the dialectic between medical and social power, as manifested in the local tension between good medicines and “bad hearts”. Tibetan Medicine among the Buddhist Dards of Ladakh offers new insights and contributions to the growing field of medical anthropology of Tibetan medicine, as well as to the history and ethnography of a little-studied ethnic minority on the tense border between India and Pakistan.

A fine piece of scholarship affording a deep insight into the problems experienced by the amchi profession on the threshold of the 21st century, Claus Vogel - Indo-Iranian Journal 49 (2006)
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