Healing elements Craig, Sienna R
2012., 20120723, 2012, 2012-08-22
eBook
Tibetan medicine has come to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. On the one hand it must retain a sense of cultural authenticity and a connection to Tibetan Buddhism; on the other ...it must prove efficacious and safe according to biomedical standards. Recently, Tibetan medicine has found a place within the multibillion-dollar market for complementary, traditional, and herbal medicines as people around the world seek alternative paths to wellness. Healing Elements explores how Tibetan medicine circulates through diverse settings in Nepal, China, and beyond as commercial goods and gifts, and as target therapies and panacea for biophysical and psychosocial ills. Through an exploration of efficacy – what does it mean to say Tibetan medicine "works"? – this book illustrates a bio-politics of traditional medicine and the meaningful, if contested, translations of science and healing that occur across distinct social ecologies.
Adaptive evolution in humans has rarely been characterized for its whole set of components, i.e. selective pressure, adaptive phenotype, beneficial alleles and realized fitness differential. We ...combined approaches for detecting polygenic adaptations and for mapping the genetic bases of physiological and fertility phenotypes in approximately 1000 indigenous ethnically Tibetan women from Nepal, adapted to high altitude. The results of genome-wide association analyses and tests for polygenic adaptations showed evidence of positive selection for alleles associated with more pregnancies and live births and evidence of negative selection for those associated with higher offspring mortality. Lower hemoglobin level did not show clear evidence for polygenic adaptation, despite its strong association with an EPAS1 haplotype carrying selective sweep signals.
Summary
This flash essay introduces a special section on flash ethnography. We consider how and why this genre has emerged as a vital intervention for ethnographic practice and theoretical ...storytelling. We invite questions about the value, methods, and scope of this form—a move toward un‐disciplining our writing and offering new ways of thinking about ethnographic wholes.
The Ends of Kinship Craig, Sienna R; Kaimal, Padma; Sivaramakrishnan, K ...
10/2020
eBook
For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on
agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal
migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary
wage labor ...abroad have shaped their experiences for decades. Yet,
more recently, permanent migrations to New York City, where many
have settled, are reshaping lives and social worlds. Mustang has
experienced one of the highest rates of depopulation in
contemporary Nepal-a profoundly visible depopulation that contrasts
with the relative invisibility of Himalayan migrants in New
York.
Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork with people in and
from Mustang, this book combines narrative ethnography and short
fiction to engage with foundational questions in cultural
anthropology: How do different generations abide with and
understand each other? How are traditions defended and transformed
in the context of new mobilities? Anthropologist Sienna Craig draws
on khora, the Tibetan Buddhist notion of cyclic existence as well
as the daily act of circumambulating the sacred, to think about
cycles of movement and patterns of world-making, shedding light on
how kinship remains both firm and flexible in the face of
migration. From a high Himalayan kingdom to the streets of Brooklyn
and Queens, The Ends of Kinship explores dynamics of
migration and social change, asking how individuals, families, and
communities care for each other and carve out spaces of belonging.
It also speaks broadly to issues of immigration and diaspora;
belonging and identity; and the nexus of environmental, economic,
and cultural transformation.
ABSTRACT
New York City (NYC) garnered significant national and international attention when it emerged as the coronavirus epicentre in the USA, in spring 2020. As has been widely documented, this ...crisis has disproportionately impacted minority, immigrant and marginalized communities. Among those affected were people from Mustang, Nepal, a Himalayan region bordering Tibet. This community is often rendered invisible within larger Asian immigrant populations, but the presence of Mustangis in the US has transformed their translocal worlds, lived between Nepal and NYC. Seasonal mobility and life‐stage wage labour in cosmopolitan Asia have been common in Mustang for decades. More permanent moves to NYC began in the 1990s. These migrations were based on assumptions about attaining financial stability in the US in ways deemed unattainable in Nepal. An ethnographic focus on one translocal Mustangi family frames this discussion of how COVID‐19 has overturned previously held ideas around migration to NYC and uncovered new forms of precarity. The authors build on theories of transnationalism and translocality to position migration as a cyclical process whereby the well‐being of Mustangis in Nepal and NYC rests on the reliability of global migratory networks and translocal kinship relations — a basis for security and belonging that COVID‐19 has challenged and reconfigured.
Nascent medical students’ first view into medical school orients them toward what is considered important in medicine. Based on ethnography conducted over 18 months at a New England medical school, ...this article explores themes which emerged during a first-year student orientation and examines how these scripts resurface across a four-year curriculum, revealing dynamics of enculturation into an institution and the broader profession. We analyze orientation activities as discursive and embodied fields which serve “practical” purposes of making new social geographies familiar, but which also frame institutional values surrounding “soft” aspects of medicine: professionalism; dynamics of hierarchy and vulnerability; and social difference. By examining orientation and connecting these insights to later, discerning educational moments, we argue that orientation reveals tensions between the overt and hidden curricula within medical education, including what being a good doctor means. Our findings are based on data from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant-observation in didactic and clinical settings. This article answers calls within medical anthropology and medical education literature to recognize implicit values at play in producing physicians, unearthing ethnographically how these values are learned longitudinally via persisting gaps between formal and hidden curricula. Assumptions hidden in plain sight call for ongoing medical education reform.
This article examines the circulation of humanitarian ideas, materials, and actions in a non‐biomedical and non‐Judeo–Christian context: Sowa Rigpa or Tibetan medical camps in India and Nepal. ...Through these camps, practitioners and patients alike often overtly articulate Sowa Rigpa medicine as part of a broader humanitarian “good” motivated by a Buddhist‐inflected ethics of compassion and a moral economy of care, diverging from mainstream public health and conventional humanitarian projects. Three ethnographic case studies demonstrate how micro‐political interactions at camps engage with ethical and religious imaginaries. We show how the ordinary ethics of Sowa Rigpa humanitarianism gain distinct political meaning in contrast to non‐Tibetan forms of aid, reconfiguring the relationship between Buddhism, essential medicines, moral economies, and politics. While Sowa Rigpa as a medical system operates transnationally, these camps are organized around local logics of emergent care, employing narratives of “charity” and Buddhist compassion when addressing health needs.
Objectives
Connecting traits to biological pathways and genes relies on stable observations. Researchers typically determine traits once, expecting careful study protocols to yield measurements free ...of noise. This report examines that expectation with test–retest repeatability analyses for traits used regularly in research on adaptation to high‐altitude hypoxia, often in settings without climate control.
Methods
Two hundred ninety‐one ethnic Tibetan women residing from 3500 to 4200 m in Upper Mustang District, Nepal, provided three observations of hemoglobin concentration, percent of oxygen saturation of hemoglobin, and pulse by noninvasive pulse oximetry under conditions designed to minimize environmental noise.
Results
High‐intraclass correlation coefficients and low within‐subject coefficients of variation reflected consistent measurements. Percent of oxygen saturation had the highest intraclass correlation coefficient and the smallest within‐subject coefficient of variability; measurement noise occurred mainly in the lower values. Hemoglobin concentration and pulse presented slightly higher within‐subject coefficients of variation; measurement noise occurred across the range of values. The women had performed the same measurements 7 years earlier using the same devices and protocol. The sample means and SD observed across 7 years differed little. Hemoglobin concentration increased substantially after menopause.
Conclusions
Analyzing repeatability features of traits may improve our interpretation of statistical analyses and detection of variation from measurement or biology. The high levels of measurement repeatability and biological stability support the continued use of these robust traits for investigating human adaptation in this altitude range.
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