Positioning Sowa Rigpa in India

Blaikie, Calum

doi:10.17157/mat.3.2.352

MAT

2016

DOI: 10.17157/mat.3.2.352

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Positioning Sowa Rigpa in India

Calum Blaikie¹

Abstract: The years leading up to the recognition of Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine) by the Government of India in 2010 saw unprecedented interaction between various branches of the tradition and the state apparatus. These interactions grew particularly intense during March 2008, when two conferences focusing on related issues took place. The first referred to 'Tibetan medicine' and was organised by Tibetan exile institutions, while the second spoke of 'Sowa Rigpa' and was hosted by a coalition of Himalayan Indian associa… Show more

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Cited by 11 publications

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References 46 publications

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“…A similar process of transformation into a commercial standardized medicine is also found in Tibetan communities in India, a development that could be interpreted as part of modernization and pharmaceuticalization (Kloos 2013(Kloos , 2016Blaike 2016). …”

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confidence: 72%

Pathways, intersections, and hotspots

Powers¹

2017

MAT

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This article describes how Tibetan medicine, traditionally an ethnomedicine indigenous to Tibetan areas, travels across cultural boundaries in a multiethnic region, presenting empirical findings from Rebgong (Ch. Tongren) in Qinghai province, People's Republic of China. Focusing on Muslim Hui and Han Chinese citizens, we describe how these patients smoothly engage with Tibetan medicine. This, we argue, is enabled by a strong sense of trust in distinguished Tibetan doctors, or 'lineage doctors', and their privately produced Tibetan medicines, and by shared understandings of the patient role. Contemporary medical pluralism in Rebgong invites us to revisit classic themes in medical anthropology as it brings the study of ethnomedicine into the context of a reconfigured instrumentalized public health system and ethnic relations, in which trust is a rare and treasured quality.

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confidence: 72%

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Powers¹

2017

MAT

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“…They are expensive, and these here have been blessed 3 In India, Tibetan medicine was officially recognized under the name of Sowa Rigpa in 2010 under AYUSH (the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa, and Homoeopathy, Government of India). See Craig and Gerke 2016 for a critical discussion on the naming of Sowa Rigpa; see Blakie 2016 andKloos 2016 for the recognition process in India; and see Kloos 2013 for how Tibetan medicine became a "medical system" in India. 4 http://www.openyourlife.de/ magicpills.htm.…”

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Tibetan Precious Pills as Therapeutics and Rejuvenating Longevity Tonics

Gerke

2017

Hist. Sci. South Asia

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Tibetan precious pills are frequently attributed with a variety of efficacies, from “magical” powers, prevention of poisoning and infectious diseases, protection from harmful spirits and exposure to diseases while travelling, to rejuvenating and prolonging life through clearing the senses and promoting strength and vigor. They are prescribed as strong medicines for severe diseases, but are also advertised as rejuvenating tonics for the healthy. This paper explores the rejuvenating qualities attributed to precious pills in terms of how they are currently advertised, how rejuvenation is and has been explained in Tibetan works on precious pills, and how Tibetan physicians understand these attributes. How do these domains interact and refer to each other? I compare aspects of rejuvenation in precious pill formulas with contemporary presentations of precious pills online and on published leaflets given out to patients in India and elsewhere. In Tibetan medical texts certain precious pills that contain the complex and processed mercury-sulfide ash called tsotel in addition to a large variety of other medicinal substances are presented as “precious pills” or rinchen rilbu, and only some of those are said to have rejuvenating effects on the body; most are primarily prescribed for specific diseases. The practice of giving precious pills to the healthy emerges more prominently in eighteenth to nineteenth century manuals on administering precious pills (Czaja 2015), which parallels the establishment of influential medical and monastic networks that promoted the making of tsotel and precious pills. I argue that precious pills have more recently widened their specific therapeutic target beyond that of medicine into becoming popular pills for rejuvenation, even if they do not contain tsotel, as part of pharmaceutical commodification. I also show how presentations of precious pills as “rejuvenating” are deeply linked to their availability.

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“…On Tibetan medicines, see in particular Blaikie et al 2015 on co-producing efficacious medicines among physicians of Tibetan medicine alias Sowa Rigpa from Nepal, Ladakh, and Tibetan areas of China. See also Craig and Glover 2009; Blaikie 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015.…”

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Contested Issues of Efficacy and Safety between Transnational Formulation Regimes of Tibetan Medicines in China and Europe

Schrempf

2015

Asian Med

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Tibetan medicines are key material objects for medical treatment and have become part of a global trend of 'pharmaceuticalisation', playing increasingly important political and socio-economic roles in an 'alternative modernity'. As I argue in this paper, they also have become key 'sites of contestation' between different epistemic values and styles of practice related to efficacy and safety that are reproduced in and through specific formulation regimes. Based on my multisited ethnography of production, prescription, and use practices of Tibetan medicines in China and Europe, this paper conceptualises three distinct formulation regimes, offering a heuristic model for transnational comparison-a classical, an industrialised or reformulated, and a polyherbal regime. The first two are the major orientations while the polyherbal is a conjoint hybrid with either the classical or the industrialised formulation regime. Globalised national drug safety regulations legalise and confer legitimacy to industrialised Tibetan formulas that follow biomedically defined efficacy, safety, and disease categories, while classical formulas produced by private physicians or small-scale cottage pharmacies are increasingly marginalised as producing 'unsafe' and at times illegal medicines, and need to find new ways for adapting and circulating their formulas.

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Positioning Sowa Rigpa in India

Cited by 11 publications

References 46 publications

Pathways, intersections, and hotspots

Pathways, intersections, and hotspots

Tibetan Precious Pills as Therapeutics and Rejuvenating Longevity Tonics

Contested Issues of Efficacy and Safety between Transnational Formulation Regimes of Tibetan Medicines in China and Europe

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