Plant matters: Buddhist medicine and economies of attention in postsocialist Siberia
American Ethnologist
Short Title:
Am. Ethnol.Plant matters
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
2017/05//
Pages:
341 - 354
Sources ID:
97021
Collection:
Himalayan and Tibetan Medicine
Visibility:
Public (group default)
Abstract:
(Show)
Buddhist medicine (sowa rigpa) in Siberia frames the natural world as overflowing with therapeutic potencies: "There is nothing in the world that isn't a medicine," goes a common refrain. An exploration of sowa rigpa practitioners' committed relations with the plants they make into medicines challenges human-centric notions of efficacy in anthropological discussions of healing. Their work of making things medicinal-or pharmacopoiesis-centers on plants' vital materialities and requires attention to the entanglements among vegetal and human communities and bodies. Potency is thus not the fixed property of substances in a closed therapeutic encounter but the result of a socially and ecologically distributed practice of guided transformations, a practice that is managed through the attentive labor of multiple actors, human and otherwise. In Siberia, pharmacopoiesis makes explicit the layered relations among postsocialist deindustrialization, Buddhist cosmologies, ailing human bodies, and botanical life.