Main description:

Traditional medicine enjoys widespread appeal in today's Russia, an appeal that has often been framed either as a holdover from pre-Soviet times or as the symptom of capitalist growing pains and vanishing Soviet modes of life. Mixing Medicines seeks to reconsider these logics of emptiness and replenishment. Set in Buryatia, a semi-autonomous indigenous republic in Southeastern Siberia, the book offers an ethnography of the institutionalization of Tibetan medicine, a botanically-based therapeutic practice framed as at once foreign, international, and local to Russia's Buddhist regions.

By highlighting the cosmopolitan nature of Tibetan medicine and the culturally specific origins of biomedicine, the book shows how people in Buryatia trouble entrenched center-periphery models, complicating narratives about isolation and political marginality. Chudakova argues that a therapeutic life mediated through the practices of traditional medicines is not a last-resort response to sociopolitical abandonment but depends on a densely collective mingling of human and non-human worlds that produces new senses of rootedness, while reshaping regional and national conversations about care, history, and belonging.

Contents:

Introduction | 1

1 "May All Living Beings Benefit": Passions of Translation | 25

2 "To Search for the Solely Rational": Engineering Tibetan Pulse Diagnosis | 70

3 "The Medicine of the Future, Now Available": Geographies of Medical Integration | 106

4 "Treating Not the Illness, but the Patient": Integrative Medicine for Dislocated Bodies | 157

5 "We Are Not Iron That We Need Tempering": The Contingencies of Mixing Medicines | 194

6 "Nothing in the World That Couldn't Be Medicinal": The Limits of Extraction | 229

Conclusion | 263

Acknowledgments | 281

Notes | 285

Bibliography | 295

Index | 319