plants; environment; medicine, postsocialism; Buddhism; Buryatia; Russia
摘要
Buddhist medicine (sowa rigpa) in Siberia frames the natural world as overflowing with therapeutic potencies: “There is nothing in the world that isn't a medicine,” goes a common refrain. An exploration of sowa rigpa practitioners’ committed relations with the plants they make into medicines challenges human-centric notions of efficacy in anthropological discussions of healing. Their work of making things medicinal—or pharmacopoiesis—centers on plants’ vital materialities and requires attention to the entanglements among vegetal and human communities and bodies. Potency is thus not the fixed property of substances in a closed therapeutic encounter but the result of a socially and ecologically distributed practice of guided transformations, a practice that is managed through the attentive labor of multiple actors, human and otherwise. In Siberia, pharmacopoiesis makes explicit the layered relations among postsocialist deindustrialization, Buddhist cosmologies, ailing human bodies, and botanical life.
目次
Conceptualizing vital vegetalities 342 Bags of plants and bones: Commensurationand materiality 343 Natural medicines: Herbs, markets, and theoriesof plant potency 345 Compound natures: The multiple livesof contentious botanicals 346 Gathering dust: Attention, scale, and the laborof making things inert 347 The ecopolitics of sowa rigpa 349 Conclusion: “Nothing on earth that isn’ta medicine” 351 Notes 352 References 353
