Central Michigan University’s (CMU) GEAR UP program, started through a grant from Michigan Campus Compact, incorporates College Positive Volunteerism (CPV) into their existing MI GEAR UP programming by establishing a cohort of college student leaders who recruit additional college students to serve with youth, expose them to higher education and let them know that college is achievable, accessible and affordable.
Homepage for the Centre for Bhutan Studies, established by the Royal Government of Bhutan in 1999. Its objectives include conducting evaluative studies on existing programmes of the government and providing feedback on the basis of which the Royal Government can improve programmes and policies;Supporting basic research by other agencies in Bhutan; Conducting inter-disciplinary studies of Bhutan in its social, cultural, and economic aspects, focussing largely, but not exclusively, on contemporary issues; Acting as a clearing-house of information on various studies and researches being conducted in Bhutan and abroad by foreign institutes. Within Bhutan, the Centre will maintain a close research alliance with other people and institutes engaged in similar activities.
The center's projects cover a wide-range of disciplines and the contact information for the center found on this website will be useful to scholars in many fields of Bhutan studies.
In this webinar, Carolyn Jacobs and Mirabai Bush engage in a dialogue about their experiences teaching students in Smith College’s Contemplative Clinical Practice Advanced Certificate Program. Carolyn and Mirabai discuss common challenges that arise during the integration of contemplative practices into college courses, including: handling difficult emotions or thoughts that students experience during practices, choosing and designing practices which complement the course material, and creating a safe and welcoming space for students from a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds. They also explore some of the cognitive, social, and emotional benefits of using contemplative methods in the classroom. Webinar participants will had the opportunity to submit questions to the presenters.
The elements of the assemblage so far discussed include techniques of production, laws and regulations, machines and factory premises, raw materials and different forms of knowledge. These elements condition and enable industrial production. What has not been examined so far is the output the factories produce and the aesthetic reasoning behind the manufacturing of Tibetan medicines. The study of aesthetics, in the original sense of the term, is concerned with the question of beauty, taste, style and artistic quality. My interest in the aesthetic, visual and material dimensions of the Tibetan medicine industry, however, is of a different kind. In
The referents ‘mantra’ and ‘syringe’ in my title may serve as two general, iconic poles in a shared cultural logic of healing among Tibetan communities. Towards the ‘religious’ end of this spectrum,mantramay represent here the ritual healing practices performed by professional healers and patients. Syringe, on the other hand, refers to a ‘scientific’ biomedical technology commonly in use among Tibetans (and in rural China in general) that became the symbolic signifier for and hallmark of Western medicine and modernity. The term syringe is meant to indicate intravenous injections (IV) usually containing an antibiotic that are frequently used for
The women’s inpatient ward at Mentsikhang smells of disinfectant and butter tea. Nurses in cool pink frocks and doctors in white lab coats talk with patients and family members in the building’s corridors. Unlike other hospitals in Lhasa, Mentsikhang is known for providers with good bedside manner and a willingness to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay. One morning in late 2002 I arrive at Mentsikhang with one of the Principal Investigators (PIs) of the NIH-funded project with which I am involved as a research coordinator and ethnographer. She is a midwife with a Ph.D. in public health,
The wave of change that has accompanied Tibetan medicine’s rapid industrialisation has not abated. While the outcome is still unfolding, chances are high that the creation of an industry will be looked at as a crucial turning point in the history of Sowa Rigpa in Tibet. I hope to have shown that the industry continues to reformulate much of the context in which Sowa Rigpa is pursued and conceived of today, ranging from manufacturing practices and the herb trade to the production of knowledge and Sowa Rigpa’s new entanglements with the politics of cultural heritage. However, the ways in which
This chapter discusses the process of how classical Tibetan medical terms acquire new meanings, especially when practitioners of ‘Tibetan medicine’ in both the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and Indian exile¹ are exposed to ideas about biomedicine. The ethnographic examples presented are based on doctoral fieldwork (2004-2006) carried out among Dharamsala Men-Tsee-Khang trained Tibetan doctors working in the Darjeeling Hills, India. In the second part of this chapter I give the example of two biomedical terms, ‘oxygen’ and ‘haemoglobin’, and analyse how they are used and interpreted in the Tibetan clinical practice of Amchi Jamyang Tashi at the Kalimpong Men-Tsee-Khang
A comprehensive history of Sowa Rigpa in the twentieth century is yet to be written. Rather than taking on this greater task my aim here is to identify the forces that shaped the industrialisation of Tibetan medicine. Whereas the actual creation of the industry started only in the 1990s, earlier events in the history of Sowa Rigpa under communist rule set the basic conditions for its development. In the first part of this chapter these basic conditions are discussed. I argue that the history of Sowa Rigpa in the People’s Republic of China has to be understood in relation to
Wangdu tilts his hat against the glare of morning sun.¹ This seniormenpa, as eastern Tibetans often refer to Sowa Rigpa practitioners, is of slight stature and few words. He is sixty-one. After living through the Cultural Revolution as well as thelongue duréeof the Reform Era, Wangdu has retired from his position as a government health worker in Yunnan Province’s Dechen (Ch. Diqin) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. He still sees patients at his home and continues to mentor people like Gawa, a thirty-year-old doctor with whom I am also traveling, and Samphel, amenpaand social entrepreneur in his
The chapters in this book are innovative in the multi-dimensional picture that they present of the interaction, over a wide range of places and times, between Tibetan modes of healing and the European-derived tradition of biomedicine. They are innovative in another respect as well; as Vincanne Adams, Mona Schrempf and Sienna Craig announce in their Introduction, this volume is intended to present an account that is based on the sensibility ofsowa rigpa, the Tibetan ‘science of healing’, rather than that of biomedicine, and that takessowa rigpa, not biomedicine, as its epistemological starting point. In this closing chapter, I
Where can one draw the line between the authority of tradition to focus our observations of the physical world and observation’s potential to challenge accepted beliefs? If Buddhist tantric theory states that there are channels of energy running up and down the center of the human torso and these are not found upon inspection, how can one adjudicate between the Buddha’s word and empirical observation? In Tibet these questions were never more poignant than in the medical arts, for the visceral reality of the human body consistently confronted the claims of the medical tradition. Janet Gyatso places the fulcrum point
In March 1996, a medical conference took place in Dharamsala bringing together doctors and researchers of Tibetan medicine from the Tibetan exile community in order to discuss this medical system in the age of globalization. The ‘Conference on Clinical Research in Tibetan Medicine’ (Bod sman nad bcos nyams zhib kyi tshogs chen) took place on the initiative of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and was organized by the Research and Development Department of the Men-Tsee-Khang (MTK). Doctors from all over India assembled in Dharamsala. Most of them were trained in Tibetan medicine, some of them in biomedicine and a few in
The notion of ritual efficacy has a long history in both the discipline of anthropology and in the context of Tibetan civilization. One need only look as far as Evans-Pritchard’sWitchcraft,Oracles and Magic Among the Azande(1976) or Lévi-Strauss’s seminal insights in ‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’ (1967) to understand the salience of inquiry into the ways meaning is made through ritualized action, and by which cure - or other types of biosocial transformation - is attained. In medical anthropology, a more general concern with what is meant by the term ‘efficacy’ across biomedical and non-Western medical praxes has
This chapter deals with socio-economic inequalities between first-and second-generation refugees (old-timers), and recently arrived Tibetans (newcomers). First, I explore the support networks available to ‘old-timers’ and how these impact on health-seeking behaviour. Secondly, I turn to the newcomers’ predicament and investigate their views on support and health in exile. The Tibetan community in India is composed of a heterogeneous range of social groups, encompassing first-generation refugees, second-or third-generation India-born Tibetans, and newcomers (Bhatia et al., 2002a). First-generation Tibet-born refugees now represent only approximately 35 per cent of the exile population. The economic constraints of exile may have ‘physically’ reduced Tibetan
Steam wafts from the cup of jasmine tea around which my friend Pema wraps his hands on this cool autumn morning in Lhasa in November 2002.¹ Beyond the tea house, commuters scuttle along Jiang Su Lu, a north-south corridor on which the Inpatient Division of the Mentsikhang is located. A few weeks ago a strapping Irishman, strawberry blond and somewhat brazen, appeared on the expatriate scene in Lhasa. He said he was looking for potential investment opportunities. Tibetan medicine was one avenue for the venture capital at his disposal. The Irishman picked up on Pema’s English abilities and that his
A few yards down the road from Dharamsala’s Tibetan Delek Hospital, an imposing metal gate opens onto a labyrinthine complex at the heart of Gangkyi. A strong aroma of dried plants and the characteristic odour of burning juniper leaves (shugpa) diffuse through the Mentsikhang courtyard. The compound looks deserted at first, with only a few children chasing bicycle wheels in the dust. The soft rumble of large copper pill makers is heard in the distance. Looking up to the quarters where staff live and hold their consultations however, one soon becomes aware of a quiet buzz of activity. Patients disappear
Aku Jinpa was sitting cross-legged on the bed of his simple study room. He was chanting. With his left hand he turned the pages of the Tibetan scripture that lay on the table in front of him, while his right hand rhythmically pulled the strings attached to two prayer wheels next to the table. To keep them turning seemed to require neither effort nor attention. Aku Jinpa, a man in his sixties with a big black moustache, wore a simple brown jacket. Nothing in his appearance betrayed the fact that he was one of the most famous Tibetan doctors in
A growing body of scholarship from the fields of history, anthropology, science and technology studies, and philosophy addresses the translation of scientific epistemologies as practices between and across cultures. Nowhere is this engagement more compelling than in discussions of medicine: what it consists in, how its claims to knowledge and efficacy are validated, how it allows for innovation and at the same time advocates a consistent empirical position, and how it is configured within cultural and national imaginaries and global markets. Likewise, socio-cultural and colonial studies of medicine reveal how biomedical science - translated into a variety of clinical, technological,
With the advent of industrial production, the issue of to whom Sowa Rigpa belongs has gained considerable relevance. As knowledge of Sowa Rigpa acquires potential market value, new questions arise: Who is entitled to use the formulas and who is eligible to reap the benefits from producing them? In the preceding chapters knowledge has been discussed in relation to the strategictechneand tacticalmētisof production and trade; in this chapter knowledge will be examined as part of the industrial assemblage in yet another form, namely, as intellectual property. In the context of Sowa Rigpa and the industrial production
On the day of our visit to the homeopathic hospital at Harihar Bhawan, Gyatso and I make it as far as the Bagmati Bridge before our taxi is forced to pull over. It is March 2007. The sky above the Kathmandu Valley is clear, but the streets are filled with unrest. Recent political agitation bymadhesigroups along Nepal’s southern border has left Kathmandu in a state of perpetual shortage.¹ Strikes and road blockades have stopped the flow of petrol, cooking gas, and other essentials into the valley. Although Nepal’s second People’s Movement that reached its apex in April 2006
Pages |