Buddhism, science, and market: The globalisation of Tibetan medicine

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the processes by which Tibetan medicine has become globalised, and the ways in which these have come to determine, constrain, and, ultimately, transform local practices of healing in both Tibet and the West. I examine the degree to which globalisation, in particular international market capitalism, operating in this case through the Chinese state, structures the content of primary medical resources, confers legitimacy to certain technologies, and sets the ground rules by which the healers in charge of deploying such technologies are set into conversation with one another. I also argue that the cultural dimensions of globalisation enter the local context through the multiple-stranded flows of people, images, and ideas, and contribute to redefinitions of identity, suffering, and body praxis among patients/consumers in diverse local contexts. I proceed within two registers of analysis. In the first, I analyse these movements in the context of Tibetan medicine as it has been transformed, practised, and used, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. In the second, the analytic lens shifts to a focus on Tibetan medicine as a 'global' alternative medicine in North America and Europe. The focus throughout is on the global-local dialectic: how Tibetan medicine is both produced as global commodity and consumed as 'local' tradition.

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