Tibetan medicine today. Neo-traditionalism as an analytical lens and a political tool

Notwithstanding a marked increase in academic publications pertaining to the contemporary dynamics of Tibetan medicine in the past two decades, the light cast in this domain by the social sciences is still diffuse and the corresponding studies are scattered. There is no specialized work that thoroughly examines this medicine in diverse regions for a given period and, a remarkable fact, Tibetan medicine has long remained absent from fundamental collective works and special issues of international journals dealing with Asian medicines (cf. Bates 1995, Leslie 1976, Leslie and Young 1992, Pfleiderer 1988). The only comparative endeavour was the work by Connor and Samuel (2001), who included in their book three chapters on Tibetan medicine (by Adams, Janes and Samuel) concerned with the Tibet Autonomous Region and exiled Tibetans in India (Dalhousie). This edited volume examines the articulation between the global and the local in various Asian societies in order to account for the way in which modernity is manifested or produced through medicine by means of negotiation, appropriation and transformation. This was the first time that Tibetan medicine appeared in a work on social sciences specializing in Asian therapies. However, studies in comparative anthropology were never extended to the whole of the Tibetan cultural area, even though the first works on Tibetan medicine go back to the end of the 1980s (e.g. Adams 1988, 1992; Kuhn 1988; Meyer 1986, 1987, 1993) and the number of studies subsequently saw an exponential increase.