The 20th Asia Pacific Research Prize (Iue Prize) winner: Dr. Kei Nagaoka

- Summary -

  This paper discusses people's experience of illness and medical practice in the contemporary Himalayas, where Tibetan medicine is increasingly institutionalized, through an ethnography in Tawang, northeastern India, and argues multi-layered relationships between medicines and human bodies. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, with the primary health care policy that has been promoted by the WHO, Tibetan medicine has been undergoing professional qualification along with the mass production of medicines in both China and India. In previous studies, the modern situation in which traditional medicine is linked to nationalism and globalization, and is reconstructed and expanded as a cultural symbol or indigenous resource, has been actively discussed. In particular, anthropological studies of Tibetan medicine have tended to analyze the relationship between professional organizations as the agents of institutionalization and Tibetan identity as “Tibetan-ness”. On the other hand, however, the various practices of Tibetan medicine in the Himalaya region and the perspectives of the lay people who suffer from illnesses have not been sufficiently discussed because they are considered to be "peripheral" parts to institutionalization as “center” by the previous studies. This paper focuses on the contact zone as a place where the residents of the Himalaya region and Tibetan medicine newly meet, rather than from the perspective of the center/periphery of the institutionalization. Based on successive fieldwork in Tawang, the local history of the region and the interaction between healers, professional organizations, the government, and the villagers over illnesses are depicted through ethnographic descriptions. The Tawang people are mostly Tibetan Buddhists living in the highlands under the influence of border development by the Indian government. Illnesses are called “natsa”, “nupa”, and “daw” depending on the situations among the people in their everyday lives. While institutionalized Tibetan medicine is mainly practiced for the treatment and prevention of illness of natsa, rituals of Buddhist monks and oracles, religious medicines distributed by the monasteries, and folk medicines in villages have an important role in the treatment and prevention of illness of nupa and daw. As different multiple bodies are experienced in the context of natsa, nupa, and daw, this thesis argues that medical practices are not differentiated by knowledge systems or institutional frameworks among the people, rather the practices coexist with different healers and medicines overlapping each other, and illness is lived with multiple bodies in the encounter between newly institutionalized Tibetan medicine and people.