viernes, 9 de marzo de 2018


Australasian Association of Buddhist Studies (AABS)
Dear list members,

Our first seminar for 2018 will be at 6:00-7:30pm on Wednesday March 7 in Lecture Theater S325 of the John Woolley Building, University of Sydney.

We hope you can attend.

Kind regards,
AABS Executive


Trauma and Time: Tibetan Medical Responses to Nepal’s 2015 Earthquakes

It is often said that traditional medicine, including Tibetan medicine, succeeds in the treatment of chronic conditions, whereas biomedicine is a better option for acute care. This stereotype is voiced not only by biomedical practitioners and patients but also by Tibetan physicians themselves. Indeed, it is part of how Tibetan medical “neo-traditionalism” operates. Even as this view is embraced and validated by diverse social actors, it remains incomplete. The limitations of this dichotomy become particularly apparent when considering health care needs that are biological, psychological, and social, such as those which emerge during states of emergency, including natural disasters. Even so, determining how – or if – and to what ends traditional medicine should be deployed in such moments remains virtually absent in global health circles and under-represented in scholarship on medical humanitarianism. Yet Tibetan physicians (who may also be religious practitioners) are called to action in times of crisis. This talk focuses on Buddhist approaches to healing, health, and illness within the context of Himalayan and Tibetan communities. It is framed around an ethnographic exploration of how practitioners of Sowa Rigpa (gso ba rig pa), the Tibetan “science of healing,” responded to the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal – and specifically the destruction experienced in the Langtang Valley, Rasuwa District. By highlighting the roles of these practitioners—at once doctors and monks or tantric ritual specialists—in responding to individual and collective suffering, this talk will explore the relationship between medical and Buddhist practice. In turn, this allows for a rethinking of what traditional medicine is “good for,” particularly in relation to that human urge of “the need to help”, including similarities and differences between forms of secular humanitarianism and a Buddhist response to crisis.

Sienna R. Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College (USA). She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2006. A medical anthropologist whose work focuses on cross-cultural experiences of medicine, health, and illness, global and women’s health, and migration and social change, she is the author of Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalayas (2008) and Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012), and the co-editor of Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds (2010), among other publications. From 2012-2017 she served as co-editor of HIMALAYA, Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, and she serves on the Executive Council of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicines (IASTAM). 


Buddhist reliquary stupa

Gold leaf covered schist reliquary in the form of a stupa.  Kusana period, North Western India. National Museum, Karachi, Pakistan. Copyright: Huntington, John C. and Susan L.Huntington Archive