RAI Research Seminar
Thursday 3 April 2025, 3.00-5.00pm BST
This is a hybrid event
To join us at the RAI (Address), register here. To join us online via Zoom, register here
Whose Medicine?
Sowa Rigpa between Tibetan Culture
and Indian Geopolitics
Stephan Kloos, Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Are Tibetans losing control over their most important national symbol next to Tibetan Buddhism? This lecture examines the integration of Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan Medicine) into India’s AYUSH system following its 2010 recognition as an “Indian system of medicine”. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with practitioners and policymakers, I trace how Sowa Rigpa’s dual valuation – as a potential UNESCO “intangible cultural heritage” and a marketable healthcare asset – inserts it into India’s political and economic aspirations, while amplifying Tibetan fears of cultural dispossession.
I argue that India’s increasing efforts to develop traditional medicine as both a lucrative industry and a (geo-)political tool for nation-branding seek to erase Tibetan identity, but simultaneously depend on Tibetan expertise. Through the case of Sowa Rigpa, this lecture reflects on the cultural, economic, and geopolitical significance of industrialized Asian medicines and broader capitalist reconfigurations of culture, medicine, and nationalism. Can marginalized groups like the Tibetans retain control over their medical traditions, cultural heritage, and national symbols as these are incorporated into state bureaucracy and the capitalist market?
Stephan Kloos received his PhD in Medical Anthropology from the Universities of California, San Francisco and Berkeley in 2010, and has been working as a researcher, director, and deputy director at the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) since 2011. After leading various international research projects (ERC, MSCA, FWF), he received his venia docendi (Habilitation) from the University of Vienna’s Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2022, where he is regularly lecturing. For the past 20+ years, his work on Tibetan medicine and nationalism has sought to contribute to wider medical and social anthropological debates on exile, postcolonialism, humanitarianism, global health, Tibetan politics, and the socioeconomic transformations of Asia. For a full CV and list of talks, projects, and publications, see www.stephankloos.org.
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Image credit: SebGeo 2008
