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- Title
Plant matters: Buddhist medicine and economies of attention in postsocialist Siberia.
- Authors
CHUDAKOVA, TATIANA
- Abstract
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. [ plants, environment, medicine, postsocialism, Buddhism, Buryatia, Russia]
- Subjects
BURYATIA (Russia); BUDDHIST medicine; HEALING; ECLECTIC medicine; ALTERNATIVE medicine
- Publication
American Ethnologist, 2017, Vol 44, Issue 2, p341
- ISSN
0094-0496
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/amet.12483