Recovering health: Tibetan medicine and biocosmopolitics in Russia.

摘要

Recovering Health interrogates the popularization of nonbiomedical therapies in Russia, expressed in efforts to formalize medical traditions associated with the state's geographic and temporal "others." Formulated as a possible solution to Russia's healthcare crisis, traditional medical practices are tasked with redressing a fraught medical system, where biomedicine itself is increasingly perceived as no longer sufficient for individual and collective projects of health maintenance. State-backed efforts to formalize ethnically and culturally marked therapies present a stark paradox in a social context otherwise characterized by normative biopolitical positions and discourses. This dissertation is an ethnography of therapeutic life at the peripheries of state power, set in the Siberian region of Buryatia that unexpectedly finds itself at the vanguard of projects of medical integration via a local tradition of Buddhist medicine. The dissertation tracks how the incommensurabilities produced at the sites of therapeutic encounter multiply competing claims to non-universal "natures"---local biologies, embodied medical knowledge, and therapeutically potent environments whose efficacies can never be fully accessed or excised through the scientific, biomedical, and administrative regimes that try to incorporate them. These emergent therapeutic logics offer alternative conceptualizations of regional belonging, and the ethics of caring for local bodies and subjects.